"Critchley is Žižek": In Defence of Critical Political Philosophy

Abstract

In an ironically ?i?ekian manner, this paper argues that Simon Critchley and Slavoj ?i?ek's apparent political disagreement (ludic reformist versus strident revolutionary) conceal a common set of preconditions and presuppositions. These presuppositions can be summed by the slogan "the for getting of political philosophy", which more specifically means the forgetting of the difference between philosophy and political life, and the reflective need to find mediations between the two. Critchley's turn to humour honours the notion that politics is about the realm of appearances, while ?i?ek's frank avowal of the "diabolical evil" of the subject of the death drive makes patently clear the dangers posed by a "politics of Truth".     

Recognitive Freedom: Hegel and the Problem of Recognition

Abstract

This paper examines the theme of recognition in Hegel's account of self-consciousness, suggesting that there are unresolved difficulties with the relationship between the normative sense of mutual recognition and phenomenological cases of unequal recognition. Recent readings of Hegel deal with this problem by positing an implicit distinction between an ‘ontological’ sense of recognition as a precondition for autonomous subjectivity, and a ‘normative’ sense of recognition as embodied in rational social and political institutions. Drawing on recent work by Robert Pippin and Axel Honneth, I argue that Hegel's conception of rational freedom provides the key to grasping the relationship between the ontological and normative senses of recognition. Recognitive freedom provides a way of appropriating Hegel's theory of recognition for contemporary social philosophy.     

‘A willing Odysseus’: The life and times of Albert O. Hirschman

Abstract

In this review essay of Jeremy Adelman's biography of Albert O. Hirschman, A worldly philosopher, supplemented by references to other secondary works on Hirschman, I take the opportunity to discuss the relationship between the economist's life and his main publications. I argue that in times of crisis more attempts like Hirschman's political economy are needed. I further argue that Hirschman has given us a good idea of what a new moral economy, which really deserves this name, would look like.     

What Mr. Spock told the earthlings: the aims of political philosophy,action-guidingness and fact-dependency

Abstract

Recently, G. A. Cohen introduced an influential distinction between fact-sensitive and fact-insensitive principles arguing that all basic normative principles are of the latter type. David Miller rejects this claim submitting that the validity of basic normative political principles depends on some general propositions about human nature and societies; for example, that men’s generosity is ‘confined’ and that nature has made ‘scanty provision’ for his wants. Miller ties this view of the nature of basic political principles to the view that political philosophy ought to guide people engaged in real-world politics and claims plausibly that in order to fulfil this purpose, political philosophy must be informed by social science. I argue that Miller neither succeeds in showing that basic principles can be fact-sensitive, nor establishes any connection between the Cohen-Miller disagreement on fact-sensitivity, on the one hand, and the nature and aims of political philosophy, on the other hand.     

The iron law of democratic socialism: British and Austrian influences on the young Karl Polanyi

Abstract

A central thesis of Karl Polanyi's The great transformation concerns the tensions between capitalism and democracy: the former embodies the principle of inequality, while democracy represents that of equality. This paper explores the intellectual heritage of this thesis, in the ‘functional theory’ of G.D.H. Cole and Otto Bauer and in the writings of Eduard Bernstein. It scrutinizes Polanyi's relationship with Bernstein's ‘evolutionary socialism’ and charts his ‘double movement’ vis-à-vis Marxist philosophy: in the 1910s he reacted sharply against Marxism's deterministic excesses, but he then, in the 1920s, engaged in sympathetic dialogue with Austro-Marxist thinkers. The latter, like Bernstein, disavowed economic determinism and insisted upon the importance and autonomy of ethics. Yet they simultaneously predicted a law-like expansion of democracy from the political to the economic arena. Analysis of this contradiction provides the basis for a concluding discussion that reconsiders the deterministic threads in Polanyi's oeuvre. Whereas for some Polanyi scholars these attest to his residual attraction to Marxism, I argue that matters are more complex. While Polanyi did repudiate the more rigidly deterministic of currents in Marxist philosophy, those to which he was attracted, notably Bernstein's ‘revision’ and Austro-Marxism, incorporated a deterministic fatalism of their own, in respect of democratization. Herein lies a more convincing explanation of Polanyi's incomplete escape from a deterministic philosophy of history, as exemplified in his masterwork, The great transformation.     

Becoming Who We Are: Democracy and the Political Problem of Hope

Abstract

In this article I argue that hope is rightly numbered by Hesiod among the evils, as hope cannot be separated from an awareness of the inadequacy of one's current state. Political hope for democrats in particular is tied to the awareness that we have not yet realized ourselves, that, to paraphrase Pindar, we have not yet become who we are. I argue that, although Rorty comes close to articulating this in his book Achieving Our Country, his emphasis on pride ultimately obscures more than it reveals. I conclude that Thoreau's anguished reflection in Walden on the failures of his fellow citizens is a better place to look for instruction on the question of political hope.     

Politics of Violence

Abstract

Simon Critchley's Infinitely Demanding makes a timely contribution to contemporary debates in ethics and political philosophy. For all its originality, however, one can raise critical questions concerning Critchley's account of the forms of resistance possible within liberal democratic polities. In this article I question the adequacy of Critchley's ethically based neo-anarchism as a response to neo-liberalism, critically analysing the role of ideology in his account of the motivational deficit afflicting capitalist liberal democracies.     

Global equality of opportunity and self-determination in the context of immigration

David Miller’s political philosophy of immigration employs two complementary argumentative strategies to challenge open border theories. The first strategy is to defeat the principled case for open borders, such as the global equality of opportunity argument for more lax immigration control. The second strategy is to establish the democratic community’s prima facie right to determine the shape of its future, including membership and the right to exclude. First, I argue that Miller’s conception of global equality of opportunity is overly narrow and that his objections to the principle, to the metric and to what counts as feasible political action misfire against other, more plausible, accounts. Second, I argue that his democratic interpretation of collective self-determination does not solve the pressing question concerning the morally justified scope and content of self-determination and the moral limits of the right to exclude. I conclude by questioning Miller’s general strategy: whether theories of immigration should be engaged in an exercise of shifting the burden of proof between open and closed borders. By contrast, I argue that a more desirable task for the political philosophy of immigration is to find ways in which the joint requirement of global equality of opportunity and collective self-determination can be coherently upheld.     

Deleuze and Guattari's Historiophilosophy: Philosophical Thought and its Historical Milieu

Abstract

This paper will examine the relation between philosophical thought and the various milieus in which such thought takes place using the late work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It will argue that Deleuze and Guattari's assessment of this relation involves a rearticulation of philosophy as an historiophilosophy. To claim that Deleuze and Guattari promote such a form of philosophy is contentious, as their work is often noted for implementing an ontological distinction between becoming and history, whereby the former is associated with the act of creation and the latter with retrospective representations of this creative process. Furthermore, when elaborating on the creative nature of philosophical thought, Deleuze and Guattari explicitly refer to philosophy as a geophilosophy that is in contrast to history. Nevertheless, this paper will demonstrate that far from abandoning the category of history, Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of the relations between philosophical thought and relative milieus suggests to us an historical ontology and methodology that is a critical part of philosophy's nature.     

Reconciliation Arguments in John Rawls’s Political Philosophy

Abstract

Recently debates about the worth of “ideal theory” have directed attention to the functions that an account of a perfectly just society can serve. One function is that of “reconciliation”: learning that a seemingly undesirable feature of the social world would exist even in the perfectly just society can show us the value that it has in the present as well. John Rawls has emphasized reconciliation as among the roles of political philosophy. For instance, Rawls claims that his theory of justice can reconcile us to the pluralism of liberal democracies. In this essay, I argue that Rawls’s political theory also can reconcile the inhabitants of liberal democratic societies to the fact that such societies may be cognitively confusing on account of their complexity. Then I contend that Rawls’s work offers valuable theoretical resources for analysing a society’s transparency or lack thereof.     

Contrarian investment philosophy in the American stock market: on investment advice and the crowd conundrum

Abstract

This paper contributes to the understanding of the role of crowds in the financial market by examining the historical origins and theoretical underpinnings of contrarian investment philosophy. Developed in non-scientific, practice-oriented ‘how to’ handbooks in 1920s and 1930s America, contrarian investment advice was aimed at so-called small investors rather than well-established market practitioners. Emerging out of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century debates about public participation in the stock market, the contrarians expanded on a widely held (amongst financial writers) scepticism about the investment and speculation skills (or lack thereof) of the masses and adopted ideas from the theoretical discipline of crowd psychology, whereby they positioned the mass (i.e. the crowd) in opposition to the successful investor. I argue that despite its idiosyncrasies, the contrarians’ conception of the market based on crowd psychology points to a fundamental fragility of market participants, which still lingers on in recent debates about the wisdom of financial market crowds.     

The deep error of political libertarianism: self-ownership,choice, and what’s really valuable in life

ABSTRACT

Contemporary versions of natural rights libertarianism trace their locus classicus to Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. But although there have been many criticisms of the version of political libertarianism put forward by Nozick, many of these objections fail to meet basic methodological desiderata. Thus, Nozick’s libertarianism deserves to be re-examined. In this paper I develop a new argument which meets these desiderata. Specifically, I argue that the libertarian conception of self-ownership, the view’s foundation, implies what I call the Asymmetrical Value Claim: a dubious claim about the importance of choice relative to other valuable capacities. I argue that this misunderstands what is really valuable in life, and show how it causes libertarianism to generate counterintuitive public policy recommendations.     

Spinoza Now

Abstract

This discussion of Infinitely Demanding explores the terms of the paradox with which Critchley is centrally concerned: how an ethico-politics can at once begin in disappointment and yet allow for engagement, the infinite renewal of commitment and optimism. Placing this in critical relation to the paradox Rorty meets with his account of the "private ironist and public liberal" in Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, I argue that Critchley's ethico-politics invokes the possibility of a non-ironical categorical imperative, at the meeting point of finitude and the infinite and at the heart of what is also a political space of intersubjectivity. I examine the logic of humour and of commitment within the Kantian frame thus suggested, arguing for their relevance to certain aspects of anarcho-activism, but also for their limitations in desperate circumstances, posing the risk that Critchley's preferred politics falls back into liberal complacency.     

The elusiveness of regional order: Leifer,the English school and Southeast Asia

Abstract

‘Regional order’ was Michael Leifer's yardstick of choice to assess the international relations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Leifer's recurrent theme was how elusive, and at times how illusory, regional order was for Southeast Asia. The elusiveness of regional order is attributed to ASEAN's lack of a set of genuinely shared assumptions about their interrelationships with each other and external states. This article challenges Leifer's portrait of a Southeast Asia devoid of regional order. I argue that Leifer's notion of order is theoretically underdeveloped and methodologically imprecise, allowing the analyst to see disorder in every minor perturbation in the region. I propose replacing ‘regional order’ with ‘peace and stability’, the preferred terms of the discourse by ASEAN's policy elites. By the latter criteria, ASEAN and the Asia-Pacific, contrary to the skeptics, have made impressive progress in the last forty years.     

Declarations of independence 1

Abstract

With the recent landslide electoral triumph of Tony Blair's New Labour in Britain, the question of the degree of convergence between Labour and the Conservatives in opposition takes on even greater strategic and political significance. It is generally undisputed that the terms of political debate in contemporary Britain have been altered markedly in recent years, and that this is not unrelated to Labour's self‐styled “modernisation” in the face of four consecutive election defeats. More contentious, however, is the interpretation of this trend. Has Labour abandoned its socialist and social democratic traditions, re‐projecting itself as an essentially conservative, even Thatcher‐ite, party, or has it managed to develop a novel, dynamic and modernising social democracy for new times? In this paper I seek to provide a benchmark against which such propositions can be evaluated, assessing the extent of bipartisan convergence since 1992. On the basis of comparisons of policy commitments at the 1992 and 1997 general elections, I argue that there has indeed been significant convergence between the parties, that this convergence has been driven principally by Labour, and that Britain is witnessing the emergence of a new bipartisan consensus. Such an interpretation is further reinforced by a consideration of revisions to policy since the Tories’ electoral debacle, which would merely seem to confirm the ascendancy of neo‐liberalism in contemporary Britain. I conclude by considering the likely trajectory of social and economic policy under a New Labour administration with a seemingly unassailable parliamentary majority.     

Radical Protestantism and doux commerce: the trials and tribulations of Nantucket's Quaker whaling community

Abstract

This paper discusses the complex relationship between morals and markets and uses the case of Nantucket as an illustration. I argue that it was a specific Protestant work ethic promoted by Quakerism that facilitated the rise of Nantucket to become the capital of the American whaling fleet for more than a century. However, I also argue that the same morals and values that helped to give birth to the Quaker whaling empire contributed significantly to the downfall of the Quaker community, decades before whaling in general got into crisis. In more general terms this paper attempts to be a historical case study that illustrates the complexities of Albert O. Hirschman's doux commerce argument and particularly the way the Protestant spirit fits into Hirschman's explanation.     

Reason and the Restlessness of the Speculative: Jean-Luc Nancy's Reading of Hegel

Abstract

This paper examines Jean-Luc Nancy's interpretation of Hegel, focusing in particular on The Restlessness of the Negative. It is argued that Nancy's reading represents a significant break with other post-structuralist readings of Hegel by taking his thought to be non-metaphysical. The paper focuses in particular on the role Nancy gives to the negative in Hegel's thought. Ultimately Nancy's reading is limited as an interpretation of Hegel, since he gives no sustained explanation of the self-correcting function of reason.     

Between arbitrage and speculation: an economy of belief and doubt

Abstract

The recent debate concerning the 'sociology of arbitrage' has firmly established arbitrage as a category of theoretical significance in the social studies of finance. In this article, I seek to complicate this debate by drawing attention to a particular kind of ambiguity inherent in the category of arbitrage, as it is put to use in financial markets. I present certain Japanese arbitrageurs' reflections on the difference between arbitrage and speculation and examine the interplay of belief and doubt underlying arbitrage operations. I argue that the resulting ambivalence towards the category of arbitrage is a marker of arbitrageurs' particular epistemological stance, identity and ethical commitment. Finally, I consider the implications of arbitrage's ambiguity for the dominant trope of speculation in the critical study of financial markets more broadly.     

Knowledge and the economy: some critical comments

Abstract

In the 1990s central banking in Europe and the United States witnessed a paradigm change. A central tenet of the new paradigm was that a central bank which acts in a transparent and predictable manner reduces uncertainty for economic actors and will be better able to control inflationary expectations. Thus, central bankers set out to enhance their institution's transparency. In this paper, I argue that transparency is not limited to the release of economic data or information about decision-making procedures. It entails producing a new type of market order and results in a new agencement. This paper focuses on the European Central Bank (ECB) and on one actor it relies on: the media. Based on ethnographic data, I analyse the role of the media in the production of a transparent market order. I find that prevailing new rules, new frames and reward systems preclude journalists from playing the role the ECB would like them to play: the instrumental role of a neutral transmitter of information. The struggle between the two actors is a struggle with words, in which both journalists and central bankers want to manipulate markets with their communicative utterances, albeit in different and frequently opposing ways.