Commercium: Critical Theory From a Cosmopolitan Point of View (Reinventing Critical Theory) - Softcover

Milstein, Brian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783482842 ISBN 13: 9781783482849

Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

This book offers a unique analysis of the contradictions and pathologies of the modern international order and develops a new cosmopolitan alternative.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Brian Milstein is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Goethe University Frankfurt. He completed his PhD at the New School for Social Research, where his dissertation was awarded the Hannah Arendt Award in Politics, and he has published articles in the European Journal of Philosophy and the European Journal of Political Theory.

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Commercium

Critical Theory from a Cosmopolitan Point of View

By Brian Milstein

Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd

Copyright © 2015 Brian Milstein
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78348-284-9

Contents

Preface, ix, 
Acknowledgments, xi, 
Introduction: Idea for a Critical Social Theory Conceived with a Cosmopolitan Intention, 1, 
PART I: HABERMAS'S CRITICAL THEORY OF SOCIETY, 31, 
1 The Theory of Communicative Action, 35, 
2 The Postnational Constellation, 65, 
PART II: LIFEWORLD AND COMMERCIUM, 85, 
3 Kant, Commercium, and the Cosmopolitan Problematic, 91, 
4 The "Boundaries" of the Lifeworld, 129, 
5 Commercium beyond Kant, 151, 
PART III: THE DEMOSPATHIC STATE AND THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM, 175, 
6 Systemic Approaches to International Relations, 181, 
7 Between Functionalism and Path-Dependence, 197, 
8 The Reifying Effects of Reciprocal Force, 227, 
PART IV: THE TASKS OF A CRITICAL SOCIAL THEORY CONCEIVED WITH A COSMOPOLITAN INTENTION, 251, 
9 Critique and Crisis in World Society, 257, 
Bibliography, 281, 
Index, 299, 
About the Author, 313, 

CHAPTER 1

The Theory of Communicative Action

In 1963, Habermas published an essay titled "Between Philosophy and Science: Marxism as Critique." A metacritique of the state of Marxism in the mid-twentieth century, it is one of his earliest statements on the programmatic requirements of a critical theory of society. Habermas acknowledges that the professionalization of the social sciences has brought tremendous advances in technical knowledge of social organization, but these have taken place at the cost of methodological myopia with regard to both the normative development of society and the place of social science within it. Social science has lost sight of the practical interest inherent in its own enterprise, and theory has sundered itself from social practice. In response, Habermas invokes Horkheimer's original call for a critical theory grounded in a twofold relation of reflection that "comprehends the knowing subject in terms of the relations of social praxis, in terms of its position, both within the process of social labor and the process of enlightening the political forces about their goals."

Habermas finds in Marx an impetus toward conscious historical reflexivity that he thinks has been lost. For Habermas, the key innovation of Marx's concept of critique lay in the way he related it to the historical-philosophical idea of crisis. Marx recognized that critique cannot derive its orientation from a theory that conceives itself as prior to practice, just as it cannot derive its capacities for enlightenment from a practice divorced from theory. It cannot derive its insights from pure reason, but only from the practical interest immanent in the participant's consciousness of being both subject and object of the historical process. In Habermas's view, this was the nexus Marx was trying to achieve under his idea of a "critique of political economy." The proletariat gains its emancipatory insight through its objective place in an alienating process of endless accumulation characterized by "the domination of dead labor over the living." The complex of labor and exchange provided the engine of a history that propelled itself through periodic revolutionary overcomings of self-generated contradictions. Hence Marx came close to successfully grounding an understanding of history "with his thesis that the meaning of history can be recognized theoretically to the degree that human beings undertake to make it true practically." As Habermas explains,

Marx declares the will to make to be the precondition for the ability to know, because he had learned from Hegel to comprehend the "meaning" of history as emancipation from the contradiction of humanity with itself. The meaning of history as a whole is revealed theoretically to the degree to which mankind practically undertakes to make with will and with consciousness that history which it has always made anyhow. In so doing, critique must comprehend itself as a moment within the situation which it is seeking to supercede [Aufhebung].

Habermas believes the deficiencies of the classical Marxist approach stem from two sources. First, Marx did not account for the capacity of political mobilization to coalesce as a force autonomous from the domain of commodity exchange and social labor, a capacity that only really came to fruition in the course of democratization. Marx anticipated the concentration of capital and the oligopolization of economic activity; he did not anticipate the ability of social movements to push the state to intervene in the operation of exchange and labor, making it no longer dependent on economic laws alone but also on political power. This led the further advancement of capitalism to follow a course divergent from the one Marx predicted. Second, however, was the decay of the critical impulse behind Marx's original idea into orthodoxy. For Habermas, once Marxism began to understand itself as a "positive science," it lost its connection from the crisis-complex of history from which alone it could derive its validity as critique: "the ideological character of consciousness had to take on a metaphysical quality. ... The correct ideology was distinguished from the false solely according to the criteria of a realistic theory of knowledge. The socialist Weltanschauung was the only correct one, because it correctly 'depicts' [abbildet] the cosmic law in nature and in history." Habermas believes that Marx may have misunderstood the foundations of his own critique by interpreting it as an overcoming of philosophy tout court instead of a dialectical negotiation of philosophy and science:

Certainly Marx understood the dialectical method well enough not to misuse it crudely in this manner. But that this misunderstanding could arise, under his eyes and provided with the blessings of Engels, and thus become the foundation of an "orthodox" tradition, can be traced back to the failure to reflect on critique as such: namely, not only to justify the scientific elements against philosophy, but also to justify those elements which critique owes to its philosophical origins, against the positivistic limitations of science.

Whether or not Habermas was correct about the flaws of orthodox Marxism, the horizon of problems that critical theory needed to address had shifted dramatically over the 100 years since Marx's time. Whereas then it was the one-sided idealism of philosophy that hindered our critical understanding of history, now it was the one-sided objectivism of the positivistic social sciences. Related to this scientization of the social was the growing awareness that there was more to the modern experience of alienation than could be explained in economic terms alone: the political realm, subdued by technocratic administration and "expert cultures," presented its own arena of reification along with its own crisis tendencies. The dynamic of class struggle as Marx understood it is insufficient to claim a full view over the structure of world history as such.

Almost two decades passed between this early essay and The Theory of Communicative Action, but Habermas's idea of a "two-level concept of society" can still be read along the lines of this metacritique. We can understand Habermas's critical theory in terms of two major moves. First, he claims that labor cannot of itself provide a foundation for social life without a second dimension...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783482842
• ISBN 13: 9781783482849
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 328
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland