Research

This article argues that rising economic inequality and the decline in political trust across Western countries have systematic normative implications for Western governments’ pursuit of climate justice. The article argues that it is an essential but neglected task of nonideal political theory to identify political feasibility constraints on the pursuit of climate justice and reflect on how to overcome them. The article identifies two feasibility constraints in contemporary Western countries, the inequality constraint and the legitimation constraint, as important elements of a nonideal theory of climate justice. It argues that the French Gilets Jaunes (yellow vests) movement arose as a form of bottom-up motivational resistance to President Macron’s decarbonization policies, precisely because those policies did not take sufficient heed of the inequality and legitimation constraints. Furthermore, the article sketches elements of a roadmap for a feasible pathway for Western governments to decarbonize and observe their citizens’ duties of climate justice and argues that the framework of feasibility constraints offers a coherent, novel and urgent rationale for adopting redistributive measures such as the Carbon Fee and Dividend and participatory-democratic measures such as Citizen Assemblies as component parts of a feasible pathway to a decarbonized economy.

The idea that human beings have a basic interest in emancipation from domination is a foundational assumption of Frankfurt School critical theory and left-Hegelian thought as such. For generations of critical theorists, the assumed existence of a universal human interest in emancipation is supposed to represent the “anchor” of critical theory in social reality; it is the socially embedded rallying cry to which a critical theory of society responds. Indeed, without the assumption of an emancipatory interest, critical theory would be just another “moralistic” normative theory with no immanent basis in social practice.

Yet surprisingly, in spite of its indisputable foundational importance to critical theory, critical theorists have rarely sought to defend the idea that their work answers to such an emancipatory interest. We first encounter the contours of such a defense in the work of the young Max Horkheimer, in which, however, it remains associated with Marx's philosophy of history to an extent that subsequent generations of critical theorists have found wanting. In the mid-1960s, this led Jürgen Habermas, in his first systematic work of social philosophy, to attempt a novel account in the form of a theory of knowledge as social theory, which seeks to disclose three human cognitive interests—including an emancipatory interest—in the objective structures of our species’ history. However, this account was ultimately undermined by his reliance on psychoanalysis as a model of human emancipation, suggesting the questionable view of humanity as a collective species subject freeing itself from internal constraints.

These failures have recently led Honneth to undertake a renewed attempt to “answer critical theory's most fundamental question” (Honneth, 2017). Honneth proposes, first, a social–ontological view of the plasticity of social norms as the source of recurrent social conflict, and second, a claim that human beings have an emancipatory interest in knowledge that reveals the interests served by their one-sided interpretation and which enables transformative reinterpretation of those norms. In this article, I argue that Honneth's argument, too, is unsuccessful. Or rather, it is at best only partially successful. Honneth's argument remains incomplete, not only because its scope of application is narrower than Honneth seems to think, but also because it neglects the most important object of emancipatory knowledge—and that which I will argue is the central task of a critical theory to provide—namely, a systematic account of the power relations within which dominated groups find themselves. In response to these problems, I develop the outlines of an alternative defense of the idea of an emancipatory interest, which locates the root of emancipatory struggles in the interplay between dominated groups’ affective reactions to the experience of subjection to dominating power and the availability of the requisite epistemic and normative resources for discursively articulating these reactive attitudes as shared experiences of moral injury—resources that a critical theory of society must strive to provide.

Entry in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, Section: Justice, ed. by John Tasioulas (New York: Springer, 2023)

Relying on recent republican political theory, this article introduces and clarifies the concept of creditor domination and applies this concept in an analysis of the eurozone debt crisis and the EU’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. The article argues that two conditions, one institutional and one structural—related to the institutionally incomplete European monetary union and a structural transformation in international finance—conspired to render periphery member states in the eurozone vulnerable to creditor domination, to which they were manifestly subject in the eurozone debt crisis. The article also argues that the EU’s pandemic response “NextGen EU” represents a fundamental change in Europe’s politics of sovereign debt, which, even if only a temporary vehicle for debt mutualisation, has rendered member states much less vulnerable to creditor domination due to the pandemic’s economic fallout. Finally, the article discusses Richard Bellamy’s proposal for a “republican Europe of states” and argues that Bellamy’s proposed reforms, while insufficient to overcome the conditions of creditor domination in the eurozone, point to a dilemma for republicans, who may risk emancipating European citizens from creditor domination only at the cost of subjecting them to the dominating power of a weakly legitimated supranational fiscal authority.

This article comments on Asger Sørensen’s stimulating book “Capitalism, Alienation and Critique”. The article argues that Sørensen overlooks an important methodological contiunuity between Max Horkheimer’s and Axel Honneth’s work: namely, the model of immanent critique, to which both remain committed. Moreover, through a critical discussion of Honneth’s method of normative reconstruction, the article argues that globalized capitalism represents a serious methodological challenge not only to Honneth’s work, but to the Frankfurt School model of immanent crituque as such.

This article argues that the theory of legitimation crisis developed by Offe and Habermas offers an instructive theoretical framework for explaining the current surge of populism across the West. The article argues that this populist resurgence is indicative of a profound legitimation crisis of the Western welfare state, which ultimately derives from its inability to control a globalized economic system. The article argues that two prominent rival accounts of the populist resurgence both suffer from their inattention to the specific ideational content of populism, as a reaction to a form of elite political rule experienced as illegitimate. By contrast, the advantage of the theory of legitimation crisis is that it is able to directly account for the structural conditions of the present legitimation crisis. Finally, the article offers an integrative account of why populism tends to focus on immigration in Northern Europe and on economic issues in Southern Europe.

Practice-dependence has recently gotten a lot of press in political theory, not only for methodological reasons, but also because of its ostensible support for statism – the view that the scope of principles of justice is limited to the nation-state. This article aims to refute the claim that practice-dependence necessarily entails statism. It distinguishes two senses of practice-dependence in Rawls’s work in order to elucidate how statism follows not from Rawls’s practice-dependence methodologyas such , but from the kind of practices on which his conception depends. By distinguishing basic practices from institutionalised practices, we can identify a conception of practice-dependence, realised in the work of Jürgen Habermas, which entails cosmopolitanism. Finally, the article contrasts Rawls’s internal criticism of the nation-state with Habermas’s external criticism and argues in favour of the latter approach.

Videnskabelige artikel om debatten mellem Jürgen Habermas og Wolfgang Streeck om EU’s krise og fremtid.

Review of David Strecker’s “Logik der Macht: Zum Ort der Kritik zwischen Theorie und Praxis”

Article planned for publication in the volume Critical Theory and the Political, ed. by Anastasia Marinopoulou (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022)

Article currently in review.

Article currently in review.