{"title":"172 shades of black: Underground Airlines and critical race storytelling of alternate history","authors":"Rania Samir Youssef","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12738","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12738","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"31 4","pages":"678-687"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139611808","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":"A Critical Theory of Global Justice: The Frankfurt School and World Society , Malte Frøslee Ibsen, Oxford University Press, 2023.","authors":"Jeffrey Flynn","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12734","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12734","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"31 2","pages":"288-291"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139613628","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":"Democratic rioting: From Tocqueville's tyranny of the majority to the Baltimore uprising","authors":"Quinn Lester","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12739","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12739","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"31 4","pages":"625-639"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139613344","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}
<p>More than 90 years later, it is fascinating and encouraging to read Horkheimer's inaugural address as the second director of the Institute for Social Research. Social philosophy, as depicted in his lecture, had not yet found its specific articulation as critical theory. However, in setting out the Institute's tasks as a center for social philosophy, the key components of his emerging idea of critical theory are already visible. These will be elaborated in his programmatic essay on traditional and critical theory, which appeared in 1937 (Horkheimer, <span>1973</span>). The fundamental elements of the early Horkheimer's view of social philosophy/critical theory seem to me as pertinent as ever. This is how I understand them:</p><p>First, social philosophy's aim is to interpret philosophically “the fate of humans” (Horkheimer, <span>1988</span>, p. 20).<sup>1</sup> It must do so within a framework in which the individual and social whole exist in a dynamic relationship of mutual self-constitution (p. 20), which is in turn part of a dynamic interplay between fact and value or, as he writes, “mind” and “reality” (p. 32). We can infer from this that “the fate of humans” has a material basis and is socially produced. This calls for attentiveness to the actual facts of existing social reality. However, social philosophy must not lose sight of “the great principal questions”—questions about the relationship of the individual to society, the meaning of culture, the formation of communities, and the development of history as a whole (p. 28). In the same vein, though it must start from the concrete pressing philosophical questions of the times, it must endeavor always to keep the universal in view (p. 29).</p><p>Second, social philosophy's interpretative efforts must be based on collective inquiry in multiple areas that has an empirical component. Accordingly, it must organize investigations in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians, and psychologists work together with the aid of the most precise scientific methods, revising the concrete philosophical questions driving its interpretative efforts and rendering them more exact; it must also develop new methods in the course of such work. Social philosophical questions thereby become part of a dialectical movement, in which they are drawn into the empirical scientific process, which affects their character (p. 30); presumably they in turn impact the empirical process of inquiry. While Horkheimer does not say so explicitly in his lecture, his 1937 essay criticizes theories that hypostatize the facts, treating them as extrinsic to the human mind. He contrasts such hypostatization with critical theory's view that facts are “products which in principle should be under human control” (Horkheimer, <span>1973</span>, p. 209). In this way, “objective realities” lose the character of “pure factuality” (p. 209). In other words, critical theory recognizes the importance of a fact-driven, empirically b
{"title":"Social theory as critical theory: Horkheimer's program and its relevance today","authors":"Maeve Cooke","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12722","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12722","url":null,"abstract":"<p>More than 90 years later, it is fascinating and encouraging to read Horkheimer's inaugural address as the second director of the Institute for Social Research. Social philosophy, as depicted in his lecture, had not yet found its specific articulation as critical theory. However, in setting out the Institute's tasks as a center for social philosophy, the key components of his emerging idea of critical theory are already visible. These will be elaborated in his programmatic essay on traditional and critical theory, which appeared in 1937 (Horkheimer, <span>1973</span>). The fundamental elements of the early Horkheimer's view of social philosophy/critical theory seem to me as pertinent as ever. This is how I understand them:</p><p>First, social philosophy's aim is to interpret philosophically “the fate of humans” (Horkheimer, <span>1988</span>, p. 20).<sup>1</sup> It must do so within a framework in which the individual and social whole exist in a dynamic relationship of mutual self-constitution (p. 20), which is in turn part of a dynamic interplay between fact and value or, as he writes, “mind” and “reality” (p. 32). We can infer from this that “the fate of humans” has a material basis and is socially produced. This calls for attentiveness to the actual facts of existing social reality. However, social philosophy must not lose sight of “the great principal questions”—questions about the relationship of the individual to society, the meaning of culture, the formation of communities, and the development of history as a whole (p. 28). In the same vein, though it must start from the concrete pressing philosophical questions of the times, it must endeavor always to keep the universal in view (p. 29).</p><p>Second, social philosophy's interpretative efforts must be based on collective inquiry in multiple areas that has an empirical component. Accordingly, it must organize investigations in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians, and psychologists work together with the aid of the most precise scientific methods, revising the concrete philosophical questions driving its interpretative efforts and rendering them more exact; it must also develop new methods in the course of such work. Social philosophical questions thereby become part of a dialectical movement, in which they are drawn into the empirical scientific process, which affects their character (p. 30); presumably they in turn impact the empirical process of inquiry. While Horkheimer does not say so explicitly in his lecture, his 1937 essay criticizes theories that hypostatize the facts, treating them as extrinsic to the human mind. He contrasts such hypostatization with critical theory's view that facts are “products which in principle should be under human control” (Horkheimer, <span>1973</span>, p. 209). In this way, “objective realities” lose the character of “pure factuality” (p. 209). In other words, critical theory recognizes the importance of a fact-driven, empirically b","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"30 4","pages":"384-389"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12722","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139166573","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}
<p>By “critical theory” in a general sense, we mean a unity of philosophical reflection and social scientific analysis informed by an interest in emancipation; all critical theories methodologically and normatively aim at uncovering forms of social domination and inquire into the possibilities of overcoming them. Critical theory in the tradition of what has been called the “Frankfurt School,” however, means something more specific: It develops a historically situated and normatively reflexive, systematic <i>rational</i> critique of existing forms of social <i>unreason</i> that are ideologically presented as forms of (individual and social) <i>rationality</i> — “the unreason of the dominant reason” (Adorno, <span>2005</span>/1962, p. 151). It explains why that is the case (that is, it unveils the <i>rationale</i> for such unreason) and it also conceives of a (more) <i>rational</i> form of a social and political order.<sup>1</sup> Specifically, it asks why the existing power relations within (and beyond) a society prevent the emergence of such an order. This is consistent with Horkheimer's (<span>2002</span>/1937, p. 199; tr. amended) original understanding of critical theory as “a theory guided at every turn by a concern for reasonable conditions of life.”</p><p>As the history of this demanding theoretical program demonstrates, it poses a multitude of difficult questions: How should the “interest in emancipation” be defined so that it is truly emancipation that is being sought and not just another desire to dominate? What kind of social theory (one that includes concepts of power and ideology) is available for the negative work of critique as well as for positively identifying potentials for progress? Most importantly: Which conception of reason should be used when what is at issue is both an existing “irrational” (though functionally rational) social and political order as well as the prospect for one that has a more “rational” form?</p><p>It is a characteristic of Frankfurt-type critical theory that, despite its numerous transformations, including the radical critique of reductive, one-sided instrumental rationality in the <i>Dialectic of Enlightenment</i>, it retains Horkheimer's original idea that the notion of reason developed in Kantian and Hegelian idealism had to be systematically connected to a structural-empirical (including psychological) analysis of social forces in order to identify the “rationality” of existing unreason. Social philosophy, Horkheimer (<span>1993b</span>/1931, p. 6) says in his programmatic speech from 1931, when he started the interdisciplinary program at the Institute for Social Research, searches to understand individual and social reality in a non-positivistic way, by seeking to include in its analysis “a higher, autonomous realm of being, or at least a realm of value or normativity in which transitory human beings have a share, but which is itself not reducible to mundane events.” For critical theory this is esse
{"title":"The rational critique of social unreason. On critical theory in the Frankfurt tradition","authors":"Rainer Forst","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12724","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12724","url":null,"abstract":"<p>By “critical theory” in a general sense, we mean a unity of philosophical reflection and social scientific analysis informed by an interest in emancipation; all critical theories methodologically and normatively aim at uncovering forms of social domination and inquire into the possibilities of overcoming them. Critical theory in the tradition of what has been called the “Frankfurt School,” however, means something more specific: It develops a historically situated and normatively reflexive, systematic <i>rational</i> critique of existing forms of social <i>unreason</i> that are ideologically presented as forms of (individual and social) <i>rationality</i> — “the unreason of the dominant reason” (Adorno, <span>2005</span>/1962, p. 151). It explains why that is the case (that is, it unveils the <i>rationale</i> for such unreason) and it also conceives of a (more) <i>rational</i> form of a social and political order.<sup>1</sup> Specifically, it asks why the existing power relations within (and beyond) a society prevent the emergence of such an order. This is consistent with Horkheimer's (<span>2002</span>/1937, p. 199; tr. amended) original understanding of critical theory as “a theory guided at every turn by a concern for reasonable conditions of life.”</p><p>As the history of this demanding theoretical program demonstrates, it poses a multitude of difficult questions: How should the “interest in emancipation” be defined so that it is truly emancipation that is being sought and not just another desire to dominate? What kind of social theory (one that includes concepts of power and ideology) is available for the negative work of critique as well as for positively identifying potentials for progress? Most importantly: Which conception of reason should be used when what is at issue is both an existing “irrational” (though functionally rational) social and political order as well as the prospect for one that has a more “rational” form?</p><p>It is a characteristic of Frankfurt-type critical theory that, despite its numerous transformations, including the radical critique of reductive, one-sided instrumental rationality in the <i>Dialectic of Enlightenment</i>, it retains Horkheimer's original idea that the notion of reason developed in Kantian and Hegelian idealism had to be systematically connected to a structural-empirical (including psychological) analysis of social forces in order to identify the “rationality” of existing unreason. Social philosophy, Horkheimer (<span>1993b</span>/1931, p. 6) says in his programmatic speech from 1931, when he started the interdisciplinary program at the Institute for Social Research, searches to understand individual and social reality in a non-positivistic way, by seeking to include in its analysis “a higher, autonomous realm of being, or at least a realm of value or normativity in which transitory human beings have a share, but which is itself not reducible to mundane events.” For critical theory this is esse","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"30 4","pages":"395-400"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12724","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139171874","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}
Hubertus Buchstein, Peter E. Gordon, Axel Honneth, Ertug Tombus
{"title":"The Institute for Social Research at 100","authors":"Hubertus Buchstein, Peter E. Gordon, Axel Honneth, Ertug Tombus","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12727","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12727","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"30 4","pages":"371"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139172006","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":"If Foucault, why not Rawls? On enlarging the critical tent","authors":"Alessandro Ferrara","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12723","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12723","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"30 4","pages":"401-405"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139171641","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":"Critical theory's generational predicament","authors":"Samuel Moyn","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12730","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12730","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"30 4","pages":"419-421"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139179284","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":"We're not special: Congratulations!","authors":"Christopher F. Zurn","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12733","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12733","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"30 4","pages":"422-425"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139179932","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}
<p>A distance of exactly 100 years separates our present from the intellectual and institutional context in which talking of “critical” theory, as distinct from “traditional” theory, began to play the identity-forming role to which today's discussion owes its topic. Reflecting not only on the possible continuity but also on this factual distance can be helpful for gaining a clearer perspective of what it can mean to connect to this program today. For, first, it is only in a long history of the impact of certain texts, themes, and a certain style of theory that the impression of unity or coherence of this tradition has emerged, of which there was hardly a trace in the first decades. Neither the objectives of the Institute for Social Research in its founding phase nor the personal composition of the circle of (exclusively male) scholars around Max Horkheimer had made such a unity likely beyond a shared commitment to a heterodox, non-party Marxism.</p><p>The internal discussions in the Institute, in the pages of the <i>Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung</i> and its successor organs, and in scholarly communication with international colleagues were rather diverse and pluralistic. The disputes about the right relation to Marx and Marxism, to “bourgeois” philosophy, to psychoanalysis, to culture, to the Soviet Union, or to the question of revolution from the 1930s to the 1960s were so fierce because the one consensual line was not given and the protagonists of the debates did not agree on much. It would be rather anachronistic to assume coherence retrospectively, where a dynamic, ever-changing context of discussions had formed.</p><p>Second, in these 100 years, during which almost no stone has been left unturned in the social, cultural, and technological world, the contexts and conditions of both theory formation in general and of political–critical intervention in particular have changed profoundly. Already between the prewar and the postwar Institute, while the postal address remained the same, there were such profound differences in material endowment, symbolic significance, public efficacy, and embeddedness in academic context that the theoretical and political practice possible in each case was of a fundamentally different form. That this also affects the internal development of academic research should be evident, for it meant something different around 1930, around 1950, and around 1965 to refer to the general state of the social sciences, to react to international developments, or to work in an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary way. That this applies <i>a fortiori</i> to the contrast with the position around 2024 is to be expected. It might therefore be unproductive to create the suggestion of a seamless continuity and availability of an earlier academic-political practice, which was, after all, subject to its own situational contextual restrictions and potentials.</p><p>These skeptical remarks are intended to ward off all too great expectati
{"title":"Rethinking Critique and Theory","authors":"Martin Saar","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12731","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12731","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A distance of exactly 100 years separates our present from the intellectual and institutional context in which talking of “critical” theory, as distinct from “traditional” theory, began to play the identity-forming role to which today's discussion owes its topic. Reflecting not only on the possible continuity but also on this factual distance can be helpful for gaining a clearer perspective of what it can mean to connect to this program today. For, first, it is only in a long history of the impact of certain texts, themes, and a certain style of theory that the impression of unity or coherence of this tradition has emerged, of which there was hardly a trace in the first decades. Neither the objectives of the Institute for Social Research in its founding phase nor the personal composition of the circle of (exclusively male) scholars around Max Horkheimer had made such a unity likely beyond a shared commitment to a heterodox, non-party Marxism.</p><p>The internal discussions in the Institute, in the pages of the <i>Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung</i> and its successor organs, and in scholarly communication with international colleagues were rather diverse and pluralistic. The disputes about the right relation to Marx and Marxism, to “bourgeois” philosophy, to psychoanalysis, to culture, to the Soviet Union, or to the question of revolution from the 1930s to the 1960s were so fierce because the one consensual line was not given and the protagonists of the debates did not agree on much. It would be rather anachronistic to assume coherence retrospectively, where a dynamic, ever-changing context of discussions had formed.</p><p>Second, in these 100 years, during which almost no stone has been left unturned in the social, cultural, and technological world, the contexts and conditions of both theory formation in general and of political–critical intervention in particular have changed profoundly. Already between the prewar and the postwar Institute, while the postal address remained the same, there were such profound differences in material endowment, symbolic significance, public efficacy, and embeddedness in academic context that the theoretical and political practice possible in each case was of a fundamentally different form. That this also affects the internal development of academic research should be evident, for it meant something different around 1930, around 1950, and around 1965 to refer to the general state of the social sciences, to react to international developments, or to work in an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary way. That this applies <i>a fortiori</i> to the contrast with the position around 2024 is to be expected. It might therefore be unproductive to create the suggestion of a seamless continuity and availability of an earlier academic-political practice, which was, after all, subject to its own situational contextual restrictions and potentials.</p><p>These skeptical remarks are intended to ward off all too great expectati","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"30 4","pages":"426-430"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12731","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139180014","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}
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