Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory最新文献

I address the question of human agency from the perspective of critical social theory. Critical social theories seek to change social reality for the better in an ethical-political sense based on a critique of what is wrong with the existing one. Furthermore, they offer a perspective on changing social reality for the better that is attentive to historical, social, and geopolitical contexts. I start from the premise that the salient context today is anthropogenic ecological disaster on a global scale. I assume, furthermore, that radical changes are needed in order to arrest our current disastrous trajectory and, in the best case, redirect it. However, as things stand, human agents seem unable to bring about the radical changes that are required. As a first step toward remedying this, I postulate the need for a fundamental transformation of ethical perceptions, on both individual and collective levels: If humans globally are to grasp how the dominant modes of thinking and acting are ecologically disastrous, there has to be a radical shift in their ideas about the ethically good life.¹ Although the requisite shift in ethical perceptions will not, on its own, suffice for radical social change, I see it as its precondition. This leads me to propose a reimagined, rearticulated conception of human freedom as ecologically attuned, self-directing, self-transforming political agency.

For a number of years I have been concerned to reimagine and rearticulate the concept of freedom as a mode of ethically self-determining human agency in a democratic political context. In these reflections, my focus has been on self-directing agency as a distinctive form of social freedom, in the general sense of a mode of agency dependent on human relations within society. Recently, however, I have come to realize that this perspective is inadequate. It is insufficiently attuned to the multiple and complex relational contexts, nonhuman as well as human, in which humans exercise their agency.

The thesis driving my current endeavor is that the contemporary ecological disaster calls for a fundamental reconceptualization of human freedom as it has been understood by modern Western political thinking and embodied in everyday thought, behavior, and social practices. I offer a utopian vision of human agency, and the terms in which to articulate it, that would motivate a fundamental reorientation of thinking, behavior, and social practices globally. On a general level, I seek to show the importance at certain times in history of radical reimagining what it means to lead an ethically good life, and the need for new ethical-political vocabularies to accompany such reimaginings (Lear, 2008). My specific aim is to create a new field of possibilities amidst the dire circumstances of ecological disaster in a context where it may seem impossible even to imagine what these might be.

I use the term “utopian” advisedly, in order to st

In recent years “the Anthropocene” has come to represent a new milestone for human-induced destruction of the environment. There is a widespread consensus that industrialization processes within capitalist modernity have ushered humanity into a new geological epoch bearing little resemblance to the climatic stability of “the Holocene,” the roughly 10,000-year span within which all known human civilizations were established. Furthermore, there is general agreement that the ending of climatic stability will have a devasting impact on the Earth's ecosystems, making long-term human settlement and global supply chains difficult, if not impossible, to maintain.

This Special Section aims to stimulate critical social theories to explore ways of thinking and acting that would equip us humans better to respond to the multiple challenges we face from the increasingly inescapable reach of ecological disaster. In all five contributions, “the Anthropocene” names a historical moment in which we must reconsider the very category of the human and our constitutive interdependencies with the other-than-human. Challenging the view that only humans possess intrinsic value, Arne Vetlesen calls on us to regard other-than-human beings as moral addressees in their own right. At the same time, he argues that only humans can be considered moral agents due to their powers of reflexivity, abstraction, imagination, and future oriented thinking. These powers make humans alone responsible for their actions. Although at first glance his asymmetric model may seem in tension with it, Vetlesen's argument resonates with Maeve Cooke's call for ecologically attuned  relationships between humans and other-than-humans, in which human knowledges are not deemed in principle superior to the knowledges of other-than-human entities and ethical goodness is not determined solely by human concerns and interests but has a partial independence of them. Nonetheless, like Vetlesen, she highlights the continued importance of ethically motivated human action, leading her to propose a reimagined, rearticulated conception of human freedom as ecologically attuned, self-directing, self-transforming agency. The proposed conception aims to break decisively with the ideal of the sovereign subject as it has emerged within capitalist modernity. Yann Allard-Tremblay makes a similar argument, urging us to recognize our embeddedness in the natural world while at the same time asserting our capacity for reflexive, responsible self-direction; he calls on us to seek concrete ways in which our relationships to one another and to other-than-humans can be renewed in their localized contexts. For Indigenous peoples, this process necessitates political resurgence and the revitalization of lifeways impacted by the destructive legacy of colonialism. In the case of non-Indigenous peoples, it may require far-reaching, transformations in relation to the land they live upon. John McGuire, too, holds onto the value of

For tens of thousands of years Paleolithic hunter-gatherer communities lived in democratic systems. These democratic communities based their relations on power and freedom on what Christopher Boehm has called “reverse dominance hierarchy” systems, which, for much of human history guaranteed political equality among members of hunter-gatherer communities. The reverse dominance hierarchy is a principle that could be used today to rethink the foundations of current democracies and design political systems that ensure true political equality in our societies. To understand democracy in the history of Homo sapiens and to evaluate current democratic systems, it is necessary to broaden the usual limited perspective on democracy. Robinson (2010) points out that modern humanism considers prehistory in rather negative terms and as largely irrelevant, yet prehistory covers most of Homo sapiens’ existence and has left deep evolutionary traces in modern humans.

Carroll (2015) proposes that power and dominance structures can be divided into four major periods: (a) dominance by an alpha male individual or group; (b) egalitarianism and democracy in hunter–gatherer societies; (c) the return to dominance by an individual or groups in postagricultural societies; and (d) the resurgence of democracy in today's modern democracies. Such a far-reaching historical perspective, while admittedly rather schematic and simplified, is important because it links modern democracies to a past that encompasses thousands of years of the existence of Homo sapiens. Sterelny (2021a, 2021b) offers a chronological perspective in affirming that, since our species was established around 300,000 years ago, 97% of its history has developed in egalitarian and democratic communities. This perspective should radically change the Homo sapiens vision of themselves, their past and present, and their possibilities for the future.

The image we have of democracy and of today's liberal democracies is influenced by our vision of the history of democracy. The currently dominant perspective is that today's liberal democracies are a democratic exception in the authoritarian history of humanity, and there is a tendency to be condescending in relation to liberal democracies and to generously excuse their shortcomings. However, a perspective that recognizes long periods of radical democracies in human history can be more critical. The democracies of the Palaeolithic demonstrate that democratic political systems cover most of human history, that humans have imagined and built democracies with a very high degree of political equality, and that democratic practices are closely linked to the evolutionary development of our species. For all these reasons, reevaluating the original democracies can have a significant impact on critical evaluation of the liberal democracies of today.

I explain forms of power in prehistoric democ

Conspiracy theory has lately come under greater scrutiny in countries around the world, with several conspiracy theories having gained infamy for encouraging dangerous behaviors and attitudes among their followers: QAnon in the United States (see Coaston, 2020); claims that COVID-19 was brought to China by Americans (see Chunshan, 2020); and the broader international anti-vaccination movement (see DiRusso & Stansberry, 2022; Sturm & Albrecht, 2021), to name just a few of the most prominent. These and other conspiracy theories have contributed to undermining trust in political institutions and have even played a role in motivating political violence, as exemplified by events such as Donald Trump's claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election and the subsequent Capitol Building riot of January 6, 2021 (see Argentino, 2021; Bessner & Frost, 2021); the arrest in late 2022 of members of the Reichsbürger movement, a monarchist group associated with Holocaust revisionism and anti-Semitic conspiracism more broadly, for their involvement in a plan to overthrow the Federal Republic in Germany (see Burchett, 2022; Hill, 2022); and the storming of the Brazilian Congress by supporters of the former president Jair Bolsonaro, on the pretext that his 2022 election defeat was also fraudulent (see Nicas, 2023).

Despite the plainly political aspects of such conspiracy theories—both in terms of the content of their claims and their implications—when conspiracy theory is conceptualized or defined, politics has too often been overlooked. Conspiracy theory has often been conceptualized primarily through the lens of epistemology, seen as a particular sort of truth claim, though precise definitions and assessments of this type of claim vary (e.g., see Buenting & Taylor, 2010; Cassam, 2019; Clarke, 2002; Coady, 2007; Dentith, 2018; Keeley, 1999; Pigden, 2007; Sunstein & Vermeule, 2009). This epistemological framing is not constrained to philosophical discussions on conspiracy theory, being also present in research by political scientists on conspiracy theory. For example, in their study of how governments could respond to conspiracy theories, Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule (2009) argue that belief in harmful and false conspiracy theories is the product of what they term as a “crippled epistemology.” Similarly, while their broader argument is that conspiracy theories are more likely to be endorsed by political losers, Uscinski and Parent (2014, Chapter 2) also conceptualize conspiracy theory chiefly through the lens of epistemology; the political aspects of conspiracy theory are largely omitted from their conceptualization, and instead they focus on the standards that could be used to ju