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

{"title":"Reimagining citizenship: Exploring the intersection of ecofeminism and republicanism through political care and compulsory care service","authors":"Jaeim Park","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12742","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12742","url":null,"abstract":"<p>As the world was hit by COVID-19, care workers were once again recognized as key workers in society, whose primary responsibility is to ensure the survival and well-being of people. Care work is defined as a set of “economic activities in the home, market, community, and state that fit loosely under the rubric of human services” (Folbre, <span>2006</span>, pp. 11–12). Although care work is frequently performed within households as an unpaid form of labor and is not monetized, the pandemic has revealed a shortage of care supplies and an increasing demand for care. Despite its importance, care work remains one of the lowest-paying occupations in the global capitalist economy. Furthermore, recent studies have indicated that women, both in and outside the formal workforce, continue to bear a disproportionate burden of unpaid care work (Chopra & Zambelli, <span>2017</span>; Güney-Frahm, <span>2020</span>; Power, <span>2020</span>).</p><p>Given these complexities and contradictions, this article aims to contribute to the adequate recognition of such an essential and ineliminable form of work. Feminist scholars and care theorists have attempted to reframe care as an explicitly political idea (Held, <span>2018</span>; Kittay, <span>1999</span>; Noddings, <span>1984</span>; Robinson, <span>2010</span>; Ruddick, <span>1980</span>; Sevenhuijsen, <span>1998</span>; Tronto, <span>1993</span>). Previous research about care work has commonly been raised from an enduring critique that the notions of public sphere and citizenship have been plagued by a misogynized democracy deficit.</p><p>The first section characterizes care work as an essential maintenance activity that stems from human vulnerability. Then the second section shows how both vulnerability and care work are “feminized” and therefore “interiorised” by “imagined invulnerability,” a dominant patriarchal mentality, logic, norm, and discipline of liberal capitalism. The third section, however, argues that care should be a collective concern of all citizens, moving it out of the private sphere and into the realm of politics, by interpreting the Arendtian understanding of “the political” and “public life.” Not only is care already a political issue, but it should also be developed as a sense of citizenship, which this article shall call <i>political care</i>. This is achieved by combining ecofeminist philosophy with the republican understanding of politics and power, so that care work is no longer gendered but seen as a universal interest for all citizens in society. To this end, the article proposes an institution of compulsory care service, given its emphasis on both degendering care work and fostering active citizenship.</p><p>First and foremost, as humans, we are inherently vulnerable beings. Vulnerability is a defining aspect of our existence and is an inseparable part of what it means to be human. It stems from our corporeality and mortality and encompasses our universal susceptibility to hun","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"31 4","pages":"705-719"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12742","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140423285","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":"Technology, conscience, and the political: Harold Laski's pluralism in Carl Schmitt's intellectual development","authors":"Florian R. R. van der Zee","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12735","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12735","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"31 4","pages":"610-624"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139810441","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":"Democratic self-defense and public sphere institutions","authors":"Ludvig Norman, Ludvig Beckman","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12737","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12737","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Contemporary concerns with democratic backsliding and contestation of democratic institutions, even in consolidated democracies, have reignited longstanding debates on how democratic societies should respond to perceived anti-democratic threats and what a principled “democratic self-defense” should look like (Kirshner, <span>2014</span>; Müller, <span>2016</span>; Malkopoulou & Norman, <span>2018</span>; cf. Loewenstein, <span>1937</span>). The core dilemma in these debates concerns the extent to which restrictions on anti-democratic speech, actors, and their associations can be justified in the interest of protecting the integrity of democratic institutions and strengthening democracy's guardrails.</p><p>Variations of this dilemma, traditionally concerned with the protection of democratic institutions, have increasingly come to the fore in other arenas of democratic societies. Public sphere institutions such as schools, universities, and public broadcasting organizations, as well as social media platforms have become deeply entangled in discussions on the limits of speech and political action. These institutions are expected, either by convention or legislation, to uphold and reproduce core liberal democratic values while also remaining open to a plurality of views, allowing for the free formation and expression of political ideas. Yet, the existing literature has had less to say about what values should guide decisions to restrict or call out speech deemed to challenge liberal democratic norms in the context of these public sphere institutions.</p><p>Our concern in this article is to clearly flesh out what core dilemmas of democratic self-defense in the public sphere consist of and theorize the democratic values at stake in this context. Seeing human dignity as a fundamental value for liberal democracy, we argue, helps us to more precisely identify the character of democratic threats in the public sphere, the various ways in which democratic values may be undermined, and in light of that, how public sphere institutions may respond to these challenges.</p><p>Crucially, the assumption that human dignity is a basic democratic value allows us to identify how legally protected speech can still be highly problematic from a democratic perspective. This is important, we argue, as many of the challenges to liberal democracy involve individual-level harms, instances where the human dignity of individual people is undermined. Key to this argument is theorizing the link between attacks on the equal dignity of citizens and attacks on democracy. We tie human dignity as a democratic value to the respect and status afforded to individuals as members of a political community. Paying attention to this link in the context of democracy helps highlight characteristics of speech that have not received sustained attention in current discussions on militant democracy and democratic self-defense.</p><p>Our argument emphasizes that some members of democratic soci","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"31 4","pages":"580-594"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12737","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139810117","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":"Manifesting the revolutionary people: The Yellow Vest Movement and popular sovereignty","authors":"Samuel Hayat","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12736","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12736","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The 2010s ended as they had begun: with mass popular uprisings (Brannen et al., <span>2020</span>). And as had happened during the Arab Spring and the subsequent democratic movements of the early part of the decade, these protests took place outside of existing organizations such as parties, unions, or associations. In France, Chile, Lebanon, Iraq, Ecuador, Hong Kong, or Algeria, it was as if <i>the people</i> were spontaneously rebelling against rising prices or the encroachment of freedom by their government, which they condemned as belonging to an oligarchy. The French Yellow Vest Movement, which began in November 2018 in opposition to a rise in fuel taxes, seems to have been the inaugural uprising of this wave of protests, and it received massive media coverage in France (Moualek, <span>2022</span>; Siroux, <span>2020</span>), as well as early and pronounced scholarly interest (Bendali & Rubert, <span>2020</span>; Bourmeau, <span>2019</span>; Confavreux, <span>2019</span>; Jeanpierre, <span>2019</span>; Le Bart, <span>2020</span>; Ravelli, <span>2020</span>). Yet there was then, and still is, no consensus on the political nature of the movement. Was it a movement of selfish motorists fighting to retain their right to pollute at low cost, or was it about social and environmental justice (Dormagen et al., <span>2021</span>; Mehleb et al., <span>2021</span>)? Was it the return of the working class to the center of the political stage or a movement that transcended class distinctions (Bantigny & Hayat, <span>2019</span>; Gerbaudo, <span>2023</span>)? Was it an apolitical movement with a series of demands derived from “anger” or “relative deprivation” (Lüders et al., <span>2021</span>; Morales et al., <span>2020</span>), or was it secretly controlled by leaders who had a political agenda?<sup>1</sup> Was it a populist or popular movement (Bergem, <span>2022</span>; Guerra et al., <span>2019</span>; Legris, <span>2022</span>), right or left (Bendali et al., <span>2019</span>; Cointet et al., <span>2021</span>; Collectif d'enquête sur les Gilets jaunes, <span>2019</span>)? Was it just another episode in the long history of protest in France, or was it an unprecedented movement aiming at nothing less than a brand new social contract (Devellennes, <span>2021</span>)?</p><p>How can we make sense of this apparent impossibility of grasping what the Yellow Vest Movement really wanted? It seems that the Yellow Vests were not really heard, not because they did not speak—they were avidly invited onto TV shows, interviewed in newspapers, and many of them had tirelessly documented their own activity on social networks, especially Facebook (Baisnée et al., <span>2022</span>; Souillard et al., <span>2020</span>)—but because they did not speak appropriately political language, i.e., language that would have been transparent and easy to categorize for professional political commentators such as journalists and academics. Indeed, when they spoke, some of","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"31 4","pages":"640-660"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12736","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140486093","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":"172 shades of black: Underground Airlines and critical race storytelling of alternate history","authors":"Rania Samir Youssef","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12738","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12738","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"31 4","pages":"678-687"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139611808","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":"A Critical Theory of Global Justice: The Frankfurt School and World Society , Malte Frøslee Ibsen, Oxford University Press, 2023.","authors":"Jeffrey Flynn","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12734","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12734","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"31 2","pages":"288-291"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139613628","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":"Democratic rioting: From Tocqueville's tyranny of the majority to the Baltimore uprising","authors":"Quinn Lester","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12739","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12739","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"31 4","pages":"625-639"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139613344","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":"Social theory as critical theory: Horkheimer's program and its relevance today","authors":"Maeve Cooke","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12722","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12722","url":null,"abstract":"<p>More than 90 years later, it is fascinating and encouraging to read Horkheimer's inaugural address as the second director of the Institute for Social Research. Social philosophy, as depicted in his lecture, had not yet found its specific articulation as critical theory. However, in setting out the Institute's tasks as a center for social philosophy, the key components of his emerging idea of critical theory are already visible. These will be elaborated in his programmatic essay on traditional and critical theory, which appeared in 1937 (Horkheimer, <span>1973</span>). The fundamental elements of the early Horkheimer's view of social philosophy/critical theory seem to me as pertinent as ever. This is how I understand them:</p><p>First, social philosophy's aim is to interpret philosophically “the fate of humans” (Horkheimer, <span>1988</span>, p. 20).<sup>1</sup> It must do so within a framework in which the individual and social whole exist in a dynamic relationship of mutual self-constitution (p. 20), which is in turn part of a dynamic interplay between fact and value or, as he writes, “mind” and “reality” (p. 32). We can infer from this that “the fate of humans” has a material basis and is socially produced. This calls for attentiveness to the actual facts of existing social reality. However, social philosophy must not lose sight of “the great principal questions”—questions about the relationship of the individual to society, the meaning of culture, the formation of communities, and the development of history as a whole (p. 28). In the same vein, though it must start from the concrete pressing philosophical questions of the times, it must endeavor always to keep the universal in view (p. 29).</p><p>Second, social philosophy's interpretative efforts must be based on collective inquiry in multiple areas that has an empirical component. Accordingly, it must organize investigations in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians, and psychologists work together with the aid of the most precise scientific methods, revising the concrete philosophical questions driving its interpretative efforts and rendering them more exact; it must also develop new methods in the course of such work. Social philosophical questions thereby become part of a dialectical movement, in which they are drawn into the empirical scientific process, which affects their character (p. 30); presumably they in turn impact the empirical process of inquiry. While Horkheimer does not say so explicitly in his lecture, his 1937 essay criticizes theories that hypostatize the facts, treating them as extrinsic to the human mind. He contrasts such hypostatization with critical theory's view that facts are “products which in principle should be under human control” (Horkheimer, <span>1973</span>, p. 209). In this way, “objective realities” lose the character of “pure factuality” (p. 209). In other words, critical theory recognizes the importance of a fact-driven, empirically b","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"30 4","pages":"384-389"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12722","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139166573","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 rational critique of social unreason. On critical theory in the Frankfurt tradition","authors":"Rainer Forst","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12724","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12724","url":null,"abstract":"<p>By “critical theory” in a general sense, we mean a unity of philosophical reflection and social scientific analysis informed by an interest in emancipation; all critical theories methodologically and normatively aim at uncovering forms of social domination and inquire into the possibilities of overcoming them. Critical theory in the tradition of what has been called the “Frankfurt School,” however, means something more specific: It develops a historically situated and normatively reflexive, systematic <i>rational</i> critique of existing forms of social <i>unreason</i> that are ideologically presented as forms of (individual and social) <i>rationality</i> — “the unreason of the dominant reason” (Adorno, <span>2005</span>/1962, p. 151). It explains why that is the case (that is, it unveils the <i>rationale</i> for such unreason) and it also conceives of a (more) <i>rational</i> form of a social and political order.<sup>1</sup> Specifically, it asks why the existing power relations within (and beyond) a society prevent the emergence of such an order. This is consistent with Horkheimer's (<span>2002</span>/1937, p. 199; tr. amended) original understanding of critical theory as “a theory guided at every turn by a concern for reasonable conditions of life.”</p><p>As the history of this demanding theoretical program demonstrates, it poses a multitude of difficult questions: How should the “interest in emancipation” be defined so that it is truly emancipation that is being sought and not just another desire to dominate? What kind of social theory (one that includes concepts of power and ideology) is available for the negative work of critique as well as for positively identifying potentials for progress? Most importantly: Which conception of reason should be used when what is at issue is both an existing “irrational” (though functionally rational) social and political order as well as the prospect for one that has a more “rational” form?</p><p>It is a characteristic of Frankfurt-type critical theory that, despite its numerous transformations, including the radical critique of reductive, one-sided instrumental rationality in the <i>Dialectic of Enlightenment</i>, it retains Horkheimer's original idea that the notion of reason developed in Kantian and Hegelian idealism had to be systematically connected to a structural-empirical (including psychological) analysis of social forces in order to identify the “rationality” of existing unreason. Social philosophy, Horkheimer (<span>1993b</span>/1931, p. 6) says in his programmatic speech from 1931, when he started the interdisciplinary program at the Institute for Social Research, searches to understand individual and social reality in a non-positivistic way, by seeking to include in its analysis “a higher, autonomous realm of being, or at least a realm of value or normativity in which transitory human beings have a share, but which is itself not reducible to mundane events.” For critical theory this is esse","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"30 4","pages":"395-400"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12724","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139171874","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 Institute for Social Research at 100","authors":"Hubertus Buchstein, Peter E. Gordon, Axel Honneth, Ertug Tombus","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12727","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12727","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"30 4","pages":"371"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139172006","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}