The wake of the financial crisis has inspired hopes for dramatic change and stirred visions of capitalism’s terminal collapse. Yet capitalism is not on its deathbed, utopia is not in our future, and revolution is not in the cards. In Capitalism on Edge, Albena Azmanova demonstrates that radical progressive change is still attainable, but it must come from an unexpected direction. Azmanova’s new critique of capitalism focuses on the competitive pursuit of profit rather than on forms of ownership (...) and patterns of wealth distribution. She contends that neoliberal capitalism has mutated into a new form—precarity capitalism—marked by the emergence of a precarious multitude. Widespread economic insecurity ails the 99 percent across differences in income, education, and professional occupation; it is the underlying cause of such diverse hardships as work-related stress and chronic unemployment. In response, Azmanova calls for forging a broad alliance of strange bedfellows whose discontent would challenge not only capitalism’s unfair outcomes but also the drive for profit at its core. To achieve this synthesis, progressive forces need to go beyond the old ideological certitudes of, on the left, fighting inequality and, on the right, increasing competition. Azmanova details reforms that would enable a dramatic transformation of the current system without a revolutionary break. An iconoclastic critique of left orthodoxy, Capitalism on Edge confronts the intellectual and political impasses of our time to discern a new path of emancipation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Capitalism on Edge aims to redraw the terms of analysis of the so-called democratic capitalism and sketches a political agenda for emancipating society of its grip. This symposium reflects critically on Azmanova’s book and challenges her arguments on methodological, thematic, and substantive grounds. Azar Dakwar introduces the book’s claims and wonders about the nature of the anti-capitalistic agency Azmanova’s ascribes to the precariat. David Ingram worries about Azmanova’s deposing of “economic democracy” and the impact of which (...) on the prospect of radical change she advocates. William Callison casts doubt over the empirical plausibility of Azmanova’s vision of crisis-free transition out of democratic capitalism. Eilat Maoz interrogates Azmanova’s emancipatory project from the historical standpoint of (de)colonization and global imperialism. In her reply to these criticisms, Azmanova accepts some and parries others, while bringing their points closer to her anti-capitalist vision. (shrink)

Preface -- Introduction: the scandal of reason and the paradox of judgment -- Political judgment and the vocation of critical theory -- Critical theory: political judgment as ideologiekritik -- Philosophical liberalism: reasonable judgment -- Liberalism and critical theory in dispute -- Judgment unbound: Arendt -- From critique of power to a theory of critical judgment -- The political epistemology of judgment -- The critical consensus model -- Judgment, criticism, innovation -- Conclusion: letting go of ideal theory.

I argue that populism is not the cause of the erosion of diversity capital in contemporary democracies, it is its outcome. Focusing on the process of politicization of the social grievances articulated by populist parties and movements, I offer a diagnosis of the state of the political in contemporary democracies, in order to discern populism’s capacity to reboot democratic politics.

What is the connection between the surge of populism and the deflation of electoral support to traditional left-leaning ideological positions? How can we explain the downfall of the Left in conditions that should be propelling it to power? In its reaction both to the neo-liberal hegemony and to the rise of populism, I claim that the Left is afflicted by what Nietzsche called ‘a democratic prejudice’ – the reflex of reading history as the advent of democracy and its crisis. As (...) a result, the Left now undertakes to recover democracy by resurrecting the growth-and-redistribution policy set that was a trademark of the ‘golden age’ of social democracy in the three post-war decades. This nostalgic gesture, however, is leading the Left into another predicament, which I call the ‘paradox of emancipation’ – while fighting for equality and inclusion as essential conditions for democratic citizenship, the Left is validating the social order within which equality and inclusion are being sought – namely, order shaped by the competitive production of profit which is the root cause of our societies’ plight. The analysis concludes with a proposal for building a counter-hegemony against neo-liberal capitalism by means of enlarging the Left’s focus beyond its traditional concerns with inequality and exclusion, to address also the injustice of growing social and economic insecurity – a harm whose reach surpasses the working poor. Reformulating an agenda of social justice around issues of economic insecurity that cross the ‘class divide’ would allow the Left to mobilize a broad coalition of social forces for radical and lasting change in the direction of socialist democracy. (shrink)

This is an inquiry into the economic psychology of trust: that is, what model of the political economy of complex liberal democracies is conducive to attitudes that allow difference to be perceived in the terms of ‘significant other’, rather than as a menacing or an irrelevant stranger. As a test case of prevailing perceptions of otherness in European societies, I examine attitudes towards Turkey’s accession to the European Union.

This article presents a blueprint of a feminist agenda for the twenty-first century that is oriented not by the telos of gender parity, but instead evolves as an ‘immanent critique’ of the key structural dynamics of contemporary capitalism – within a framework of analysis derived from the tenets of Critical Theory of Frankfurt School origin. This activates a form of critique whose double focus on (1) shared conceptions of justice; and (2) structural sources of injustice, allows criteria of social justice (...) to emerge from the identification of a broad pattern of societal injustice surpassing the discrimination of particular groups. In this light, women’s victimization is but a symptom of structural dynamics negatively affecting also the alleged winners in the classical feminist agenda of critique. The analysis ultimately produces a model of social justice in a formula of socially embedded autonomy that unites work, care, and leisure. (shrink)

Against pronouncements of the recent demise of both democracy and the political, I maintain that there is, rather, something amiss with the process of politicization in which social grievances are translated into matters of political concern and become objects of policy-making. I therefore propose to seek an antidote to the de-politicizing tendencies of our age by reanimating the mechanism that transmits social conflicts and grievances into politics. To that purpose, I formulate the notion of a ‘fundamental right to politics’ as (...) the opposite of the techne of policy-making. I articulate this right via a reconstruction of the logical presuppositions of democracy as collective self-authorship. I then recast the concept of non-domination by discerning two trajectories of domination – ‘relational’ and ‘systemic’ ones, to argue that in a viable democracy that makes full use of the right to politics, the dynamics of politicization should take place along both trajectories; currently, however, matters of systemic injustice get translated in relational terms and politicized as concerns for inclusion into and distribution within the existing system of social relations, rather than its radical overhaul. (shrink)

The post-communist revolutions of 1989 triggered parallel transformation in the ideological landscape on both sides of the former Iron Curtain. The geo-political opening after the end of the Cold War made global integration a highly salient factor in political mobilization, opting out to replace the capital-versus-labor dynamics of conflict that had shaped the ideological families of Europe during the 20th century. This has resulted in splitting the traditional constituencies of the Left and the Right and reorganizing them along new fault-lines: (...) those shaped by attitudes to globalization and EU enlargement (in the West) and by attitudes to EU accession and global economic competition (in the East). Thus, an ideational convergence between East and West is taking place in Europe, radically altering the structure of political competition in the early 21st century. As the new political cleavage cuts across, rather than runs along, the left—right ideological continuum, it is eroding the societal alliances that had supported the post-war European Social Model. The emerging structure of political competition enables substantive changes in the European Social Model in the direction of deepening labor commodification, thus defeating the emancipatory potential that earlier labor-market policies had contained. (shrink)

Patriotism is subject to searing moral criticism, but is it necessarily a vice? The article offers a conditional defense of patriotism. It acknowledges that even at its best, patriotism is a dangerous virtue and prone to abuse. Nevertheless, we ought to acknowledge the truth that a just patriotism is possible, and we should seek to specify and bring about its conditions. Just as it is permissible to form deep attachments to imperfect others, so, too, it is not always wrong to (...) feel a special attachment to and responsibility for one’s own country. Even so, addressing patriotism’s manifest dangers requires enacting practical institutional reforms. These include greater protections for rights of political dissent and contestation, insulating the school curriculum from politicization and bringing more attention to the nation’s shortcomings, and greatly expanding the role of international institutions and perspectives which furnish a salutary check on national self-preference. (shrink)

This volume examines whether the Arab Uprisings introduce a replica of the European Enlightenment or rather stimulate an Arab/Islamic Awakening with its own cultural specificity and political philosophy. By placing Immanuel Kant in Tahrir Square, Cairo, this book adopts a comparative analysis of two enlightenment projects: one Arab, still under construction, with possible progression toward modernity or regression toward neo-authoritarianism, and one European, shaped by the past two centuries.

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.

Using the temperate nature of recent social protest as its entry point, this analysis investigates the current state of liberal democracies as one in which the purported crisis of capitalism has en...

I briefly review the main parameters of the conceptual framework David Ingram builds, and then proceed to test its heuristic power by examining its capacity to address three types of domination (relational, structural and systemic) typical of contemporary capitalism.

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 2, Page 259-261, June 2022.

The Problem of Perception offers two arguments against direct realism--one concerning illusion, and one concerning hallucination--that no current theory of ...

In this paper I examine Grace A. de Laguna’s theory of universals in its historical context and in relation to contemporary debates in analytic metaphysics. I explain the central features of her theory, arguing that her theory should be classified as a form of immanent realism and as a powers ontology. I then show in what ways her theory affords a theory of modality in terms of potentialities and discuss some of its consequences along the way.

A. H. Louie's More Than Life Itself is an exploratory journey in relational biology, a study of life in terms of the organization of entailment relations in living systems. This book represents a synergy of the mathematical theories of categories, lattices, and modelling, and the result is a synthetic biology that provides a characterization of life. Biology extends physics. Life is not a specialization of mechanism, but an expansive generalization of it. Organisms and machines share some common features, but organisms (...) are not machines. Life is defined by a relational closure that places it beyond the reach of physicochemical and mechanistic dogma, outside the reductionistic universe, and into the realm of impredicativity. Function dictates structure. Complexity brings forth living beings. (shrink)

This book argues for the use of nonideal theory in social ontology. The central claim is that a paradigm shift is underway in contemporary social ontology, from ideal to nonideal, and that this shift should be fully followed through. To develop and defend this central claim, the first step is to show that the key questions and central dividing lines within contemporary social ontology can be fruitfully reconstructed as a clash between two worlds, referred to as ideal and nonideal social (...) ontology. Ideal social ontology is characterized by consensus and cooperation, while nonideal social ontology is characterized by conflict and contestation. The second step is to show that, when taken together, objections to the standard model of ideal social ontology (the dominant version of ideal social ontology) imply that this model needs to be given up in favor of nonideal social ontology. In other words, we should look to nonideal rather than ideal social ontology for core concepts. The third step is to offer a positive account, called the power view, of nonideal social ontology. This account places the concept of social power at the core of a general theory of the social world and replaces the flat and narrow conception of power in ideal social ontology with a richer and more extensive conception. In addition, it rectifies a shortcoming in nonideal social ontology by attending to class, which has been notably and oddly overlooked in the literature. (shrink)

This companion is a cutting-edge primer to critical forms of the posthumanities and the feminist posthumanities, aimed at students and researchers who want to catch up with the recent theoretical developments in various fields in the humanities, such as new media studies, gender studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies, human animal studies, postcolonial critique, philosophy and environmental humanities. It contains a collection of nineteen new and original short chapters introducing influential concepts, ideas and approaches that have shaped and developed (...) new materialism, inhuman theory, critical posthumanism, feminist materialism, and posthuman philosophy. A resource for students and teachers, this comprehensive volume brings together established international scholars and emerging theorists, for timely and astute definitions of a moving target – posthuman humanities and feminist posthumanities. (shrink)

I. Ókor -- II. A középkor és a reneszánsz -- III. Az újkor.

On fundamentals of Vedanta and science; a study.

La admirable riqueza cultural y artística del Renacimiento esconde una desoladora miseria y aquella "edad de la abundancia" contrasta con una inmensa pobreza. Lejos de ser una broma o una pesadilla, la celebrada Utopía de Tomás Moro fue antes que nada un desafío insoslayable, pues proponía que ninguna sociedad merece tal nombre si tolera la miseria de un solo pobre. Rico y pobre explora la cuestión en ese libro de 1516 y en otros del escritor londinense para concluir con un (...) esbozo de su vida a la luz de la pobreza como virtud indispensable y libertadora. He aquí un hombre afortunado que no fue indiferente ante el infortunio de tantos y que vio en la humanitas la virtud por excelencia que lleva a una constante atención y cuidado del prójimo. Inspirado por un cambio de actitud en su época, así como por su fe cristiana y la mejor tradición estoica, mostró una robusta preocupación sobre el tema subrayando el valor social que debe tener toda riqueza, tanto a nivel estatal como individual, destacando la grave obligación cívica de los ricos y la necesidad que tienen todos, ricos y pobres, de empeñarse en la práctica de cierto desprendimiento y generosidad si no quieren mermar su propia humanidad y fallecer en su avaricia. La percepción de la miseria había cambiado de tal manera que su remedio ya no podía estar en una u otra limosna en plazas e iglesias, sino en la acción bien pensada y perentoria de todo gobierno que se tenga por justo. Sir Tomás Moro, privilegiado desde la cuna y seguro en su trabajo profesional, vio la pobreza de tantos como un desastre social, pero uno que, al mismo tiempo, debería llevar a todo ser humano a ver en el desprendimiento y generosidad una excelencia o virtud que alumbra la "otra" libertad, y tan íntima y valiosa que en su caso brilló aun en la prisión y ante el horror de una muerte injusta y atroz." -- Page 4 of cover. (shrink)