Adorno and the Problems of a Critical Construction of the Historical Present

Abstract

This paper argues that Adorno's metaphysics can be rescued from the constellation of his messianic materialism. The recovery of metaphysics in this context also means that it is rescued as the basis of possible critique. Rescue here entails that the ideas of truth, freedom, justice and democracy should be seen as transcending whatever is empirically given, while remaining immanently operative within society. These ideas can still be drawn on for a critique of the present, thus renewing the original project of critical theory.     

Antisemitic publishing in Greece

A number of books and newspapers spreading antisemitic ideas have appeared in Greece in the last few years.     

Mediatization of Civil Society Organizations: (De)legitimation of the Swedish Red Cross

Abstract

The article explores how media representations influence ideas about legitimate behaviour within a civil society organization (CSO). We develop understanding of the mediatization of CSOs, and in particular of how media coverage influences internal practices and decision-making. The analysis is based on a case study of the Swedish Red Cross and illustrates how (negative) media exposure influences the conditions for, and behaviour of, a CSO. The findings demonstrate that media constructed a legitimacy crisis and that the organization over time adjusted to the media story to maintain its legitimacy. The findings also suggest that professional communicators play significant roles in carrying and reinforcing ideas within CSOs about the importance of controlling media attention.     

Analysing political ideas and political action

Abstract

This paper examines the relevance of Boltanski and Thévenot's newly translated book, On justification, to the analysis of political ideas and political action. While situating the work of the authors within its initial intellectual context, namely the ‘economics of conventions’, it shows that one of the key contributions of the ‘sociology of justification’ lies in the answers it brings to two fundamental, as yet unresolved, questions in political science and political sociology: first, how is it possible to identify those ideas which are politically relevant? Second, how is it possible to capture the dynamics of public ideas? After outlining the sources of the quandaries faced within political science and political sociology as regards these two questions, the conceptual framework of Boltanski and Thévenot is presented and explained, and research perspectives suggested. This article argues that On justification provides a highly engaging, stimulating and empirically useful contribution to current debates in social and political theory around the dynamics of political arguments and ideas.     

Anti-globalization: The Global Fight for Local Autonomy

This paper examines one of the less-discussed modes of anti-globalization, relocalization or local autonomy. It describes a range of autonomous movements, summarizes their political economic ideas, and discusses some common social critiques raised in regard to local autonomy.     

Defending popular sovereignty: discursive conflict in French and Swedish parliamentary debates on immigrant voting rights (1968-2017)

ABSTRACT

Through a discourse analysis of French and Swedish legislative debates from 1968 to 2017, this article examines how actors challenge and reinforce dominant ideas about the link between nationality and political rights. We argue that the broader political culture influences which discursive strategies – or ‘frames’ – are more likely to structure parliamentary debates in different national contexts. However, our analysis also shows that legislators sometimes develop new discursive frames in which they reinterpret dominant norms to make them consistent with their views. Through this incremental process of reinterpretation and reformulation of dominant ideas, debates over non-citizen voting rights have chipped away at the link between nationality and political rights. Our findings suggest that initiatives to enfranchise non-citizens trigger lower levels of conflict when they can be framed as a policy tool for immigrant integration rather than as a matter of popular sovereignty.     

Violence and Silencing: A Philosophical Investigation of Apartheid

Abstract

With reference to examples of violence during Apartheid, I argue that the socio-political contexts in which violence occurs significantly shape agents' ideas about and responses to violence. As such, philosophers can only make sense of why perpetrators and bystanders alike may have judged violent acts morally justifiable or failed to challenge instances of violence against the backdrop of the particular characteristics of the socio-political context in which it occurs.     

Intelligence Studies Centers: Making Scholarship on Intelligence Analysis Useful

Abstract

Improving intelligence analysis requires bridging the gap between scholarship and practice. Intelligence studies as an academic discipline is not very theoretical compared to the more established disciplines of political science and international relations. In terms of conceptual depth, levels of abstraction and theoretical development, even the theoretical portions of the academic intelligence studies literature could be described as policy relevant and potentially useful for practitioners, including intelligence analysts. Yet despite this orientation to the practitioner, there is still a substantial gap between scholars and practitioners, thus replicating within a more applied context the conventional theory/practice divide that exists in other fields. Those fields do, however, possess a variety of ideas and recommendations that could be used to bring scholarship on intelligence analysis closer to practice. If implemented, these ideas might help actualize the benefits of scholarship that are as yet still unrealized potential.     

Disciplinary Divides in Post-Conflict Justice and Peace: Tracking If and How we Share Ideas

ABSTRACT

The study of post-conflict justice and peace incorporates ideas from many disciplines and on a range of topics including justice, reconciliation, democratization, and peace. While diversity is valuable, it can also lead to confusion in theory and practice and so requires close evaluation of how diverse ideas interact, and to what end. This paper begins the systematic examination of such interactions by using new bibliometric software to track citations between two particularly influential literatures contributing to post-conflict theory: the legal and the psychosocial. The paper describes how these traditions interact and the impact on the post-conflict literature as a whole.     

Schleiermacher and Post-Metaphysical Thinking

Abstract

Schleiermacher rarely features in the now widespread discussion of the relevance of the German Idealist and Romantic traditions for contemporary philosophy because he has mainly been regarded as a theologian and theorist of textual interpretation. This essay shows that his most important philosophical work, the Dialectic, involves many ideas concerning truth and language which are generally regarded as belonging to what Habermas terms ‘post-metaphysical thinking’. Schleiermacher's views of truth and language are contrasted with those of Habermas and Rorty, and are seen as being of more than merely historical interest. His reflections on self-consciousness are shown to raise important questions for contemporary accounts of the relationship of the subject to language.     

Federalism,Physicians, and Public Policy: A Comparison of Health Care Reform in Canada and Brazil

Abstract

This article uses comparative historical analysis to explore physicians’ involvement in health care reform in Canada and Brazil. Drawing on historical institutionalism, the analysis stresses how, beyond partisanship, physicians build consensus around and promote specific policy ideas, and how federal institutions shape physicians’ mobilization. In both countries, physicians’ mobilization shaped the emergence of universal health care coverage, but in quite different ways, because of the differing federal institutions. Although the Brazilian medical lobby was far more heterogeneous than the Canadian profession, one faction was able to mobilize at the local level to pursue policy ideas favorable to universal health coverage.     

Housing chronically homeless women: “Inside” a safe haven

Abstract

This case study of an innovative pilot project for chronically homeless, mentally ill women in Toronto exposes assumptions that professionals embarking on initiatives to house chronically homeless women may bring to the design of such facilities. The value of in‐depth ethnographic research in charting the effectiveness of initiatives to alleviate chronic homelessness for women and in understanding the barriers that hinder the development of effective programs is highlighted.

This article challenges conventional static understandings of the concepts of “private” and “public” and explores issues related to spatial privacy and communality, sense of ownership, ideas about the safe haven being both a home and a hostel, planning for flexibility, accountability to public flinders, and accommodation of individual needs.     

The Pluralistic Public Sphere from an Ontological Point of View

Abstract

This paper attempts to provide a rationale for a ‘model of the public sphere’ in terms of hermeneutic ontology that begins from Heidegger's Being and Time. However, this Heideggerian hermeneutic ontology will both be weakened and extended through a dialogue with social theory, which occupies a central place in this paper. More specifically, the main aim of this paper is to suggest some ideas to bridge the gap between the ontological focus on the hermeneutic fore-structure of being-in-the-public-sphere and the focus of social theory on the nexus between constructing identity and narrative, the result of which is the idea of the public sphere as an open-ended intercultural dialogue.     

Towards a Critical Theory of Cultural Pragmatics: The Márkus Road

ABSTRACT

At the time of his death in 2016 György Márkus’s magnum opus on the culture of modernity that he laboured on throughout his post-Budapest period remained unfinished. This paper attempts to reconstruct the theory of Cultural Pragmatics that lay at the core of this immense project. The intention is to retrieve the key ideas of Márkus’s understanding of modern cultural relations by reviewing the terms of his critique of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault on the issue of authorship. A distinctive Márkus road in the study of cultural modernity offers itself as a rich contemporary research programme for the future.     

An important failure: knowledge limits and the financial crisis

Abstract

This paper introduces a theme section on knowledge limits in and after the financial crisis. It explores how and why practitioners have generally responded less conservatively to crisis than academics, and argues that academics within a variety of problematics could do more by reflecting critically on the heroic ideas about the role of knowledge which were current across the social sciences in the decade before the crisis. It then turns to introduce the section's papers before finally raising the possibility of a more explicitly political approach to understanding finance.     

Gender and right-wing populism in the Low Countries: ideological variations across parties and time

ABSTRACT

Although scholarship on the general ideological orientation of right-wing populist parties is well established, few scholars have studied their ideas about gender. De Lange and Mügge therefore ask how differences in ideology shape right-wing populist parties' ideas on gender. Drawing on the qualitative content analysis of party manifestos, they compare the gender ideologies and concrete policy proposals of national and neoliberal populist parties in the Netherlands and Flanders from the 1980s to the present. They find that some parties adhere to a modern or modern-traditional view, while others espouse neo-traditional views. Moreover, some right-wing populist parties have adopted gendered readings of issues surrounding immigration and ‘Islam’, while others have not. The variation in stances on ‘classical’ gender issues can be explained by the genealogy and ideological orientation of the parties, whereas gendered views on immigration and Islam are influenced by contextual factors, such as 9/11.     

Civilization as a political disposition

Abstract

This paper outlines a number of changes in social and political thought following the momentous events of 1989: the rise of postmodernism, identitarian politics and the transformation of notions of race into culture. It indicates origins for this drift in ideas to be found in the heritage of anti-Enlightenment polemics associated with political romanticism, in Europe as well as globally, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It then concentrates on the theme of civilization, and of the use of this term in international relations.     

The Modern Concept of Aesthetic Experience: from Ascetic Pleasure to Social Criticism

Abstract

This paper examines the use of "pleasure" as the distinguishing mark of aesthetic experience in post-Kantian philosophy. It shows how the distinctive features of aesthetic experience, such as pleasure, qualify this experience as a platform for social criticism. The key argument is that the autonomy of the aesthetic experience is not "false", rather it is paradoxical in the strong sense that the fact of its communicative efficacy, which follows from distinctive, "autonomous" aesthetic features, necessarily loads it with functions and expectations that are external to the aesthetic moment. Kant takes a complicated path to qualify aesthetic judgement as disinterested in order that it may eloquently testify for morality. He thereby sets up the cogency of the modern pattern of looking to aesthetic experience as a locus of meaningful communication for ideas that are experientially poor or remote.     

Mutant Enunciations: Feminist Practices and the Anoedipal

Feminist theory and practice, and in particular Julia Kristeva's theory of the semiotic in language and Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger's explication of the matrixial, provide a basis from which to extend the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari concerning domains of signification that operate beyond the Oedipal structure. In the first part of this paper, I will discuss some relationships that may be traced between the ideas of these theorists and processes in creative practice that have the potential to constitute an alternative stratum of subjectivity not wholly dependent on Oedipalisation. This will be followed by a brief analysis of two paintings by West Australian artist Linda Banazis incorporating what I have termed the ‘X Function', an additional and transversal system to those outlined in Michael O'Toole's (1994) model of semiotic analysis of visual texts. The X Function provides a means of mapping nomadic or non-Oedipal currents, those ‘non-discursive' or resistant dimensions of texts which deny fixity or closure of interpretation.     

Toleration and modus vivendi

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to explore some connections between the ideas of toleration and modus vivendi, principally through a critical engagement with the work of John Gray. In particular, it argues that while Gray is right to see a connection between modus vivendi and a particular conception of toleration (here referred to as the ‘traditional conception’) it is both problematic and potentially confusing to tie either of these ideas, as he does, to a theory of value-pluralism. Instead, they should be viewed as distinct but partially overlapping and often mutually supportive ideas, the relevance of which are best explained in terms of the need or desire of people to live together under conditions of conflict about the worth of different ways of life, and motivated by a variety of pragmatic and principled concerns. The paper also offers a modest defence of the traditional conception of toleration against some of its critics, arguing that such a practice of toleration, if supported by a modus vivendi, can provide a peaceable means of accommodating differences in a way that is broadly accepted, although neither ideal nor necessarily uncontested, by both tolerators and the tolerated.