Examining Honneth’s Positive Theory of Recognition

ABSTRACT

In this article I examine Axel Honneth’s positive theory of recognition. While commentators agree that Honneth’s theory qualifies as a positive theory of recognition, I believe that the deeper reason for why this is an apt characterisation is not yet fully understood. I argue that, instead of considering only what it is to recognise another person and what it means for a person to be recognised, we need to focus our attention on how Honneth pictures the practice of recognition as a whole, which according to him works to make societies into places of greater freedom. This conception of recognition as a freedom-enhancing practice is supposed to provide a solution to a key problem of Frankfurt School critical theory, namely of how to determine the emancipatory practice in which critical theory is rooted, which becomes apparent as soon as one turns to the context in which Honneth originally develops his theory of recognition. At the end of the article, I offer a few reasons for doubting the overly positive picture of the practice of recognition that Honneth provides us with.     

ASEAN and regional governance after the Cold War: from regional order to regional community?

Abstract

This paper first reviews and critiques the dominant realist and constructivist accounts of ASEAN, which have enjoyed much prominence in The Pacific Review since the journal's founding in 1988. ASEAN behaviour and outcomes cannot be fitted into neat theoretical categories that emphasize either material or ideational variables in explanation. Instead, ASEAN displays complexities in behaviour that are the product of the contingent interaction between the material (power, territory, wealth) and the ideational (norms, ideas, identity) as member states actively seek to manage domestic order as well as regional order within and beyond ASEAN. In all of this, state interests and identities remain paramount, which means that the long-standing ASEAN norms of sovereignty/non-interference remain central to regional governance. Under these conditions, and despite the Charter's newly articulated political norms of democratization, human rights, and the rule of law, the prospects seem doubtful for building a people-centred ASEAN Community in which regional governance displays inclusiveness, seeking to address the interests and needs of the region's ordinary people as opposed to what its elites deem appropriate. The final portion of the paper explores what a critical approach to studying ASEAN might reveal. In particular, the paper attempts to identify whether there may be any political spaces opening up within existing structures and practices from which progressive change could emerge, even if slowly, particularly in the area of human rights and social justice, key elements in building an inclusive, ASEAN Community.     

The Liberal Left Opts for Terror

For a century, intellectual debate on political violence has been dominated by efforts to romanticize the extremist and to invest him with the aura of the altruistic “freedom fighter.” It is astonishing that in the post-9/11 era, the terrorist's image continues to remain habitually mystified and ennobled, while terror attacks are justified as self-defense. “Terrorist discourse” is indicative of the universality of the intellectual position of the Left with regard to terror, national discrepancies notwithstanding. The present article evaluates leftist liberals' attitudes towards terrorism in the 20th-century Russian Empire, Europe, the U.S., and especially Israel—one of the epicenters of terrorism today. The article proposes to examine psychological responses to terrorism in conjunction with a range of contemporary reactions to threats, acknowledged or displaced with an assortment of mental constructs and rationalizations.     

When one might not see the wood for the trees: the ‘historical turn’ in democratization studies,critical junctures,and cross-case comparisons

In a 2010 special issue of Comparative Political Studies, Giovanni Capoccia and Daniel Ziblatt introduced a new, historically oriented research agenda to the study of democratization. This agenda challenged an older, ‘classical’ tradition, inaugurated by Barrington Moore, by emphasizing diffusion, non-class structures and, most importantly, contingent choices of actors during critical junctures. In this article, I identify two problematical aspects of Capoccia and Ziblatt's intervention. First, methodologically, I argue that the focus on contingency and actors' choices in individual cases is worth little in the absence of controlled comparisons. Second, and empirically, I show that it is very difficult to see how unconstrained choices during critical junctures might have brought into existence such a systematical variation as that encountered in the case of European democratization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On this basis, I issue a warning against accepting the new research agenda across-the-board, arguing that this would have detrimental consequences for comparative historical analysis of regime change.     

Revisiting the national question and rethinking the political trajectory of Africa in the 21st century

Abstract

The national question in postcolonial Africa encapsulates the totality of national and social challenges that needs resolution. These include the burden of building postcolonial nations, reconstructing postcolonial states, promoting economic development, entrenching popular democracy, defending national sovereignty, consolidating political power, and eventually achieving regional integration and pan-African unity, as long term goals. To resolve these issues, founding fathers crafted different national projects as working ideological and political frameworks, aimed at resolving the national question. This article builds on the continuing concern about the national question, to carry out a critical historiographical study of the nature and conflicted agendas of national project(s), while at the same time providing substatiation for their resuscitation during the current age of failing capitalist neo-liberal project. The premise of the article is that the national question remains relevant beyond the 20^th century as it entails dealing with unresolved national and social questions including challenges of converting territorial nationalism into pan-Africanism as well as democratising global asymmetrical power politics in the 21^st century.     

Promoting Learning and Critical Reflexivity Through an Organizational Case Study Project

Engaging students directly with community partners can foster deeper learning and critical reflexivity. In our undergraduate seminar in “Understanding Human Service Organizations,” we developed a community-based project that has students working in groups to study local human service organizations. Students interview organizational staff, observe operations, and review documents to identify perceived organizational strengths and challenges and offer humble solutions based on course material and outside research. A key component of the course is the critically reflexive journal. Using a structured reflection guide, students describe and analyze their experience in relation to class concepts and examine their personal beliefs and assumptions. This approach is one teaching strategy that has the potential for promoting the critical awareness and reflective practice skills we seek in our students.     

The United States — Japan relationship: A post‐cold war future

Abstract

In the introduction, the editors discuss the emergence of a new body of literature on Southeast Asia's regional relations that is both theoretically informed and stimulating. One element of this literature features a constructivist challenge to realism, traditionally the dominant perspective on Southeast Asian International Relations. Constructivist writings have helped to broaden the understanding of Southeast Asia's regional order by capturing its ideational determinants (norms and identity), the agency role of local actors, and the possibility of transformation through socialization and institution building. But constructivism itself has been challenged by other perspectives, including neo-liberal, English School and critical approaches. The essays in this special issue of The Pacific Review capture this emerging debate. The editors argue that the articles in this special issue are a good indicator of the theoretical pluralism that marks the study of Southeast Asia's regional relations today. Southeast Asian studies need not be dominated by either realism or constructivism, but can accommodate a diversity that vastly enriches our understanding of regional conflict and order.     

France's last sociologist

Abstract

The publication of Michael Grenfell's Pierre Bourdieu: Agent Provocateur provides an ideal opportunity for a career retrospective of the academic sociologist who, in recent times, has taken most seriously his role as a public intellectual, indeed, one who gradually warmed to the status of ‘universal intellectual’ with increasing postmodernist disapproval. The French context of Bourdieu's development and reception is highlighted.     

Travelling with vehicular ideas: The case of the third Way

In all the various debates around Anthony Giddens's Third Way sequence, few attempts have been made to characterize its logic and impact as a type of discourse, a certain mode of ideas-work. The first dimension of this paper involves deploying Thomas Osborne's categories to depict the Third Way as a ‘vehicular’ idea, with the intellectual style of Giddens himself correlatively framed as that of a new sort of ‘mediator’. In these terms, the essential inclusiveness and indeterminacy of the Third Way series of texts is illustrated, and the issue of what counts as ideas ‘success’ in the vehicular mode is broached. Second, in line with the inherent mobility of vehicular ideas, I identify the keynote shifts in Third Way thinking over time, including the sociological register that it occupies, its pragmatism and its relationship to New Labour politics. In a third phase, the article takes up questions about the role of the critical intellectual today and the practical, though not theoretical, recovery of ‘ideology-critique’ in appraising ideas like the Third Way. The scope and limits of the very notion of ‘vehicularity’ itself are central to this discussion.     

经济全球化背景下女性国际商务人才培养与开发的路径

经济全球化和我国对外贸易的不断发展,使国际商务人才队伍不断发展壮大,尤其是女性国际商务人才更是异军突起。女性从事国际商务活动有着不可比拟的优势,据有关资料显示比例将达到60%以上。但是,在实际的国际商务活动当中,特别是在目前女性国际商务人才队伍中还存在许多亟待解决的问题。解决这些问题的有效方法是探讨出一条适合女性国际商务人才培养与开发的路径：一是加强高层次人才的培养;二是提高其综合素质;三是培养其开拓创新能力;四是培养其跨文化能力;五是培养其涉外形象。