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

{"title":"Dialectical Aristotelianism: On Marx's account of what separates us from the animals","authors":"Tom Whyman","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12712","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12712","url":null,"abstract":"<p>I have noticed, in Anglophone philosophy, a certain way of invoking Marx. The pattern here is—understandably, given the relative scarcity of substantial engagement with Marx outside of (radical) political theory—a rather loose one. But I've spotted it in the work of John McDowell, Michael Thompson, and Mary Midgley. In each of these thinkers, Marx is invoked in the context of an inquiry into human nature: into the question of what (if anything) separates us from the animals.</p><p>In this paper, I propose to adjudicate a certain debate between these three thinkers—a debate which their shared invocation of Marx allows us to stage. I will argue that this debate between McDowell, Thompson, and Midgley, such as it is, is doomed to remain interminable, unless we clear up a confusion about Marx which all three share. Clearing up this confusion will allow us to get in focus an account of human nature I label “Dialectical Aristotelianism”. I am unable to offer a detailed defense of this position here—rather, I offer it as something which might be worked out more comprehensively in other work.<sup>1</sup></p><p>The point I wish to make here, and the way I wish to make it, unfortunately demands a structure which might at first glance seem a little obscure. To spell it out: in Section 1, I introduce the perennial philosophical problem of “what separates us from the animals”—working my way toward Midgley's critique of the “single distinguishing factor” conception of what separates human beings from other animals in <i>Beast and Man</i>. Sections 2 and 3 relate an existing debate between McDowell and Thompson, who both incorporate Marx into their attempts to find such a single distinguishing factor. In Section 4, I introduce Midgley's specific criticisms of what she sees as Marx's attempt to identify a “single distinguishing factor” answer to the question of what separates us from the animals—criticisms which would seem to do for McDowell and Thompson as well. In Section 5, I explain why (in my view) Midgley was wrong about Marx—and then proceed to demonstrate that, in <i>The German Ideology</i>, he and Engels (albeit in an incomplete, increasingly disputed text) can be read as providing us with a “single distinguishing factor” answer to the question of what separates us from the animals that does <i>not</i> suffer from the problems Midgley identifies with (usual) attempts to identify such a factor. The result is an account which is, handily, able to incorporate the best of Midgley's, McDowell's, and Thompson's views. This is the position that, in the conclusion, I label “Dialectical Aristotelianism”.</p><p>As human beings, we have some notion of ourselves as a species, and not only that, we have a sense of ourselves as a different kind of species, distinct somehow from all other animals. This sense of difference is perhaps best articulated as the Aristotelian notion that humans, as rational animals, are in some important sense “between beast and god”.<sup","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"31 3","pages":"354-367"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12712","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49431759","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":"Taylor and Feuerbach on the problem of fullness: Must a meaningful life have a transcendent foundation?","authors":"Jeff Noonan","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12709","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12709","url":null,"abstract":"<p>At first glance, there would appear to be no wider gulf than between persons who believe that life is meaningful and valuable only if oriented by some transcendent force or being and those who try to steer themselves by earthly signposts alone. Since at least the Enlightenment secular humanists have tried to construct what Charles Taylor has called purely “immanent” ethics. In Taylor's influential but controversial view, materialist humanist ethical theories, and accounts of the good for human beings can be internally consistent and satisfying to their adherents, but ultimately incomplete. Taylor's argument remains compelling more than a decade after the publication of <i>A Secular Age</i> because he does not argue that “exclusive” humanist doctrines are incomplete on the terms of believers in transcendent forces and beings, but incomplete on their own terms. All deep commitments to meaning, purpose, and value in life, he suggests provocatively, in fact contain a concealed longing for transcendence of the unrecoverable passage of time and the oblivion into which subjects will disappear if there is nothing more than the physical universe and the human social world.</p><p>This paper will treat Taylor's conclusions as a challenge to account for life-value within the confines of secular time and without making secret appeals to transcendent forces or beings.<sup>1</sup> I am not going to try to turn tables on Taylor and argue that all religious believers secretly interpret their sacred texts and principles with a view to earthly happiness, but I will argue that there are more overlapping concerns than dogmatists on either side believe. My argument will be critical of Taylor's conclusions, but it is also a response to his invitation for members of different faith, traditions, and secular humanists to engage in a “more frank exchange” that acknowledges the differences but is conducted “with the kind of respect that can only come from a sense that we have something to learn from each other” (Taylor, <span>2010a</span>, p. 402). I will argue that the most important lesson that humanism teaches is that the desire for fullness, in earthly life or on some transcendent plane is not necessary and may even be a mistake. In contrast to fullness as the overarching goal of life, I will suggest that receptive openness to the world best accords with the <i>known</i> conditions of human existence. Since the receptively open person who accepts the finality of death does not demand fullness, they cannot be justly suspected of secretly steering their goals by transcendent principles.</p><p>The paper begins with a focused analysis of Taylor's argument that the emergence of natural scientific accounts of the elements and dynamics of the universe created a crisis of meaning. Exclusive humanisms are attempts to reconstruct the foundations of meaning within the confines of secular time, but no matter how rich the texture of their values, Taylor argues, they must always f","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"31 3","pages":"324-337"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12709","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47564978","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":"From politics to democracy? Bernard Williams’ basic legitimation demand in a radical realist lens","authors":"Janosch Prinz, Andy Scerri","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12710","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12710","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Political realists argue that political norms can more effectively guide judgment than can ideal norms derived from ethical principles. Three axioms shape the realist conceptualization of political norms: (a) Politics arises with the displacement of violent coercion by order and, so, authority. (b) Such authority needs a decision rule or rules. Historically, in Western states (“now and around here,” as put by Bernard Williams (<span>2005</span>, 8)), two such rules obtain. One (b<sub>1</sub>) is based on bargaining, whereby actors seek a mutually beneficial agreement that entails minimal concession, the other on deliberation (b<sub>2</sub>), whereby actors recognize a common end to pursue, taking as given relevant value differences and interests. (c) Political norms are an emergent property of the subsumption of moral values to the prudential considerations of actors involved in sustaining the step from (a) to (b).</p><p>Realists have thus far focused on normative theorizing from the axioms through the lens of legitimacy (Cozzaglio & Greene, <span>2019</span>; Cross, <span>2021</span>; Rossi, <span>2012</span>; Sigwart, <span>2013</span>; Sleat, <span>2014</span>). They have had little to say about the relationship, if any, between norms associated with (liberal) legitimacy and with democracy. This has led to claims that the new realism has little to offer democratic theory (e.g., Frega, <span>2020</span>). Interestingly, Williams gestured toward theorizing such a relationship. However, he did not fully elaborate his ideas. He not only claims that “[a]ny theory of modern [legitimacy] requires an account of democracy and political participation” (15) and that “it is a manifest fact—that some kind of democracy, participatory politics at some level, is a feature of [legitimacy] for the modern world” (17). At least implicitly, he also saw his account of liberal legitimacy and linked theory of the establishment of politics as a framework for “exploring what more radical and ambitious forms of participatory or deliberative democracy are possible …” (<span>2005</span>, 17). Taking our cue from Williams, we here begin to clarify the relationship between norms formed through the establishment of politics, we sometimes shorten as \"politicization,\"<sup>1</sup> and those through democratic agency. Motivation arises from our suspicion that Williams’ theorization of the establishment of politics—creating a normative requirement that states satisfy a “basic legitimation demand (BLD),” wherein its authority is justified “<i>to each subject</i>” (4)—stands in tension with his commitment to conceptualizing political norms in historical context and, so, genealogically (<span>2002</span>, 20ff; also, <span>2006</span>, 156). We show that Williams’ account of the norms that coincide with the establishment of politics—to whit, the step from (a) to (b) above—should not be read as also necessarily encompassing the establishment of conditions for the deepening of ","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"31 3","pages":"338-353"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12710","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47926067","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 value form and the wounds of neoliberalism","authors":"David Lebow","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12706","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12706","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Perhaps no contemporary thinker has contributed as many fundamental insights into the political pathologies and dangers of the neoliberal era as Wendy Brown. In her recent book, <i>In the Ruins of Neoliberalism</i>, Brown deepens the Foucauldian understanding of neoliberalism as a political rationality that aims to make competition the universal governing principle of society. In her previous intervention, she explored how the metastasis of neoliberal rationality's figuration of subjectivity as <i>homo economicus</i> eviscerates democratic institutions (Brown, <span>2015</span>). Both building from and amending this work, Brown now draws a close connection between neoliberalism and popular anti-democratic mobilization. Brown observes that Hayek's understanding of society as a spontaneous order that results from human action but cannot be planned by ignorant human will is a theory not just of market coordination but also of moral traditionalism. In place of social justice and democratic self-rule—whose deliberate dimension makes them incompatible with spontaneous order and individual freedom—neoliberalism substitutes the institutional anchors of property rights and “family values.” Expanding the personal sphere by Christianizing the public sphere through the language of religious liberty and defending the nation conceived as a family against nontraditional identity groups and immigrants are developments internal to neoliberal reason.</p><p>Brown argues that “neoliberal rationality prepared the ground for the mobilization and legitimacy of ferocious antidemocratic forces in the second decade of the twenty-first century” (Brown, <span>2019</span>, p. 7). The intellectual architects of neoliberalism dreaded an ignorant populace agitated by authoritarian demagogues. Nevertheless, neoliberal rationality has brought about such an outburst, not as its “intended spawn” but its “Frankensteinian creation” (Brown, <span>2019</span>, p. 10). The neoliberal program has left people without civil norms and commitments but has not wholly vanquished extra-market society. The painful humiliations of economic abandonment and the dethronement of White patriarchy have elicited a return of the repressed. Left without alternative bases for mobilization, this politics draws from a moral traditionalism that, emptied of real content, arises as vengeful patriarchism and White supremacy.</p><p>Behind Brown's reliance on Foucault lies an ambivalent relation to Marxism. Despite an avowal of indebtedness to “neo-Marxist” approaches to neoliberalism as a “new chapter of capitalism,” a reader could be forgiven for thinking upon finishing the book that the cause of our ills is neoliberal reason rather than the social imperative to accumulate (Brown, <span>2019</span>, p. 21, contrast with Brown, <span>2015</span>, p. 76). Brown criticizes Marxists far more than she cites them. At one point, she chides Marxist approaches for “tend[ing] to focus on institutions, policies, economi","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"31 3","pages":"462-480"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12706","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42853049","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":"Deliberative constitutionalism through the prism of popular sovereignty","authors":"Deven Burks","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12699","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12699","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"31 3","pages":"382-398"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49375139","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":"Rethinking hybrid regimes: The American case","authors":"Jean L. Cohen","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12700","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12700","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"30 3","pages":"241-260"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47190670","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":"Recognition of struggle: Transcending the oppressive dynamics of desire","authors":"Magnus Hörnqvist","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12711","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12711","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Recognition seems to present us with an unresolvable predicament, whether we are aware of it or not. The predicament can be formulated in the following way. We inescapably strive to be recognized by others, since recognition is a precondition for our existence as social beings in any society, while the very recognition we strive for constrains us and cements an unequal social order. The first part of the predicament, the relentless striving to reach recognition, is the basic insight conveyed by the Hegelian master-and-slave dialectic (Hegel, <span>2018</span>). It has been reiterated many times and was axiomatic in the renaissance of the concept of recognition in the early 1990s, associated with authentic self-realization (Taylor, <span>1992</span>) or the moral call of struggles (Honneth, <span>1992</span>). The oppressive consequences, on the other hand, have been emphasized by theoreticians who were attentive to existing power asymmetries as well as familiar with Hegel's argument. Recognition was inevitably oppressive, conceived of as ideological interpellation (Althusser, <span>2001</span>), objectification of the self (Sartre, <span>2018</span>), a mechanism of subjection (Butler, <span>1997</span>), regressive assertion of victimization (Brown, <span>1995</span>), or as a fundamentally skewed concept (McNay, <span>2008</span>). In this line of thinking, desire for recognition reinforced inequality, instead of realizing more freedom.</p><p>This predicament has shaped the contemporary discussion. One response was trying to find a middle way and reconcile opposing dynamics. Recognition was seen to be inherently ambivalent: crucial for personhood and autonomy, as well as for making people accommodate to stratified social positions (Allen, <span>2021</span>; Ikäheimo et al, <span>2021</span>; McQueen, <span>2014</span>). On the ambivalence reading, recognition was a mix: sometimes beneficial and sometimes detrimental. Recognition was vital for personal growth and well-being, yet oppressive when (and only when) it involved misrecognition by the other, as a consequence of its “determining identification and oppressive ascriptions” (Jaeggi, <span>2021</span>, p. 1; see also Honneth, <span>2018</span>). From this perspective, there is good recognition, which furthers personal development, as opposed to bad recognition, which constrains people. Is thereby the predicament of recognition resolved? It depends on how the oppressive element is conceptualized. Proponents of the ambivalence reading locate the oppressive mechanisms of recognition to identities and ascriptions. What if the impact of power stretches beyond identities and ascriptions? This article looks at desire and its dynamic. The thesis of what might be called the oppressive dynamics of desire, rather than identities or ascriptions, has been chosen as the point of departure. On this line of thinking, desire for recognition is from the very outset shaped by unequal social structures, and ","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"31 3","pages":"414-427"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12711","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44296844","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":"Parsing the promise of modernism: Habermas, the avant-garde and the aesthetics of normative order","authors":"Benedict Coleridge","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12701","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12701","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In a 2018 interview with Jürgen Habermas by the Spanish newspaper <i>El Pais</i>, visiting journalists noted that Habermas’ home, bedecked with modern art, presented “a juxtaposition of Bauhaus modernism and Bavaria's staunch conservatism” (Hermoso, <span>2018</span>). The shelves were lined with the German Romantics and the walls adorned with icons of European aesthetic modernism, cohering with the style of the house itself. In fleeting autobiographical remarks made in the preface to his essays in <i>Naturalism and Religion</i>, Habermas proffers an account of his decorative tastes and the experiences and hopes at which they gesture. He writes of the postwar revelations that disclosed a civilizational rupture after 1945, along with the sense of cultural release brought about by the doors being opened “to Expressionist art, to Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Hermann Hesse, to world literature written in English, to the contemporary philosophy of Sartre and the French left-wing Catholics, to Freud and Marx, as well as to the pragmatism of John Dewey…” (Habermas, <span>2008</span>, p. 19). He continues to describe how “the liberating, revolutionary spirit of Modernism found compelling visual expression in Mondrian's constructivism, in the cool geometric lines of Bauhaus architecture, and in uncompromising industrial design” (Habermas, <span>2008</span>, p. 19). Together, these aesthetic movements espoused what Rembert (<span>2015</span>) calls a determination to develop an artistic practice that conveyed a “new world image” (p. 40). According to Habermas, the “cultural opening” instigated by these aesthetic pursuits “went hand in hand with a political opening,” which primarily took the form of “the political constructions of social contract theory…combined with the pioneering spirit and the emancipatory promise of Modernism” (Habermas, <span>2008</span>, p. 19). In this brief sketch Habermas depicts politics and aesthetics working in tandem to drive emancipatory social renewal; the intellectual constructions necessary for political transformation leaned, he suggests, upon the revolutionary social vision framed by modernism's “cool geometry.” This article further explores this connection with a view to examining the role of modernism as an imaginative resource for the kind of normative integration developed by Habermas in his pursuit of the neo-Kantian “project of modernity”—that is, the project of integrating pluralistic mass societies via postmetaphysical rational presuppositions and the normative principles to which they give rise. In excavating and critiquing the resources that inform Habermas’ normative framework, this article locates an important source of inspiration in 20th century European aesthetic modernism, which, I argue, supplies something like an “orienting background metaphor,” and a methodological resource, for the envisioning of a detranscendentalized normativity based upon the dualism of form and content (Blumenberg, <span>1983</span>,","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"31 3","pages":"297-310"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12701","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43760025","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":"Two types of democratic representation for the two wills of the people","authors":"Tom Malleson","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12707","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12707","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"31 3","pages":"444-461"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45440420","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":"Recognition, power, and trust: Epistemic structural account of ideological recognition","authors":"Hiroki Narita","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12708","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12708","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Recognition is one of the most elusive and ambivalent concepts in political and social thought. In recent studies of the ambivalence of recognition (Ikäheimo et al., <span>2021</span>; Lepold, <span>2019</span>; McQueen, <span>2015</span>), recognition has the emancipatory aspect: Recognition is a necessary condition for individual freedom by forming a social basis of self-worth, and the struggle for recognition plays the significant role in political movements for emancipation. However, recognition has a dominating aspect: The demand for recognition can be exploited as an instrument for domination, reproducing existing problematic practices and identities. For example, sweatshops induce employees to voluntarily subjugate themselves to harsh working conditions by praising the employees’ self-dedicated character and enhancing their self-worth.</p><p>In recent philosophical debates, Axel Honneth has developed the most systematic theory of recognition. He discusses the problem of ambivalence in offering the concept of ideological recognition (Honneth, <span>2007</span>). Honneth's argument consists of two steps. In the first step, he defines ideological recognition as distinct from misrecognition. Misrecognition occurs when addressees believe their subjective self-image is not consistent with the recognition they receive. They feel misrecognized when their self-worth is inflicted. By contrast, the addressees have “good reason to accept” ideological recognition because they attain a stronger sense of self-worth through the recognition (p. 341). However, “ideological forms of recognition suffer a second-level rationality deficit” as it encourages the addressees’ willing subjection to the dominant social order (p. 346). This suggests that ideological recognition, an issue of “second-level rationality,” is judged independently from the addressees’ subjective perspective. Ideological recognition can be defined as that accepted by the addressees from their <i>subjective</i> point of view, but unjustified from an <i>objective</i> or <i>theoretical</i> point of view.</p><p>In the second step, Honneth proposes a substantive standard of ideological recognition, a standard of “how we can draw a distinction between justified and unjustified forms of social recognition” from an objective point of view (p. 340). According to Honneth, recognition is ideological when it maintains the addressees’ self-worth, while the evaluative promise expressed by the recognition cannot be materially instantiated. In the example above, recognizing the self-dedicated employees in the sweatshops is ideological and unjustified, for the sweatshops will not guarantee material and economic conditions for realizing the employees’ dedication to the company (not providing a minimum income level, for instance).</p><p>I argue against Honneth's substantive standard, not the conceptual definition of ideological recognition itself. It is because his standard is not broad enough to capture th","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"31 3","pages":"428-443"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12708","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42928382","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}