R A D I C A L P H I L O S O P H Y

a journal of socialist and feminist philosophy

89 CONTENTS MAY/JUNE 1998

Editorial collective
Chris Arthur, Ted Benton, Nadine Cartner,
COMMENTARY
Andrew Collier, Diana Coole, Peter Dews, Families against ‘The Family’: The Transatlantic Passage
Roy Edgley, Gregory Elliott, Howard of the Politics of Family Values
Feather, Jean Grimshaw, Kathleen Lennon,
Joseph McCarney, Kevin Magill, Peter Judith Stacey ................................................................................................. 2
Osborne, Stella Sandford, Sean Sayers
Issue editor
Chris Arthur ARTICLES
Reviews editor
Sean Sayers Out of Africa: Philosophy, ‘Race’ and Agency
Contributors Bob Carter ...................................................................................................... 8
Judith Stacey is Streisand Professor
of Contemporary Gender Studies and Adorno on Late Capitalism: Totalitarianism and the
Professor of Sociology at the University Welfare State
of Southern California. Her publications
include In the Name of The Family: Deborah Cook .............................................................................................. 16
Rethinking Family Values in the
Postmodern Age (Beacon Press, 1996).
Philosophy in Germany
Bob Carter is Senior Lecturer in
Sociology at University College Simon Critchley and Axel Honneth ........................................................... 27
Worcester. He has published extensively
on the politics of race, immigration and
nationality.
Deborah Cook teaches Philosophy at the
REVIEWS
University of Windsor, Canada. Jane Gallop, Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment
Simon Critchley is Reader in Philosophy Peter Benson ................................................................................................ 40
at the University of Essex. His recent
publications include Very Little... Almost
Nothing: Death, Philosophy and Literature
Amitai Etzioni, The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a
(Routledge, 1997). Democratic Society
Finn Bowring................................................................................................ 43
Axel Honneth is Director of the Institute
for Social Research in Frankfurt and
Professor of Philosophy at the University Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
of Frankfurt. Stewart Martin ............................................................................................ 46

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Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd.

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LETTER
Critical Social Science and Psychological Explanation
Caroline New ............................................................................................... 55

© Radical Philosophy Ltd

COMMENTARY

Families against
‘The Family’
The transatlantic passage of the
politics of family values

Judith Stacey

P
rogressive Brits beware. Political campaigns conducted in the name of The
Family are now in their third decade in the United States, and there are signs
that transatlantic missionaries are finding prominent converts in the UK. Indeed,
addressing the Labour Party Conference in 1995, Tony Blair himself proclaimed:
ʻStrengthening the family has to be a number one social priority.ʼ Perhaps a crash
course in the forms, contents, and effects of the politics of family values in the USA
can help you avoid some of their social costs.
ʻProfamilyʼ movements erupted in the USA during the mid-1970s, initially as an
explicit backlash against the sexual revolution, the counterculture, feminism and gay
liberation, all of which were viewed (and not without cause) as threatening prevailing
definitions of family and motherhood. ʻProfamilyʼ campaigns by the New Right helped
to establish the grassroots base for the Reagan–Bush era and employed an ideology
that Thatcherʼs Conservative regime echoed in a minor key. In the USA, the New Right
successfully turned the Republican Party into an anti-feminist, anti-gay, anti-abortion
fortress where now few candidates who fail any of these litmus tests can receive the
partyʼs endorsement.
The election to the presidency of Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992 seemed to
promise a shift in national political rhetoric and policy. Running on a platform of
ʻitʼs the economy, stupidʼ, Clintonʼs first presidential campaign countered reactionary
Republican profamily rhetoric with affirmations of support for diverse kinds of fami-
lies. But startlingly soon after his election, Clinton too jumped on the family-values
trolley. Republicans and Democrats alike now compete to promote their increasingly
similar brand of neoconservative politics in the name of The Family, meaning one
particular kind of family – mom, dad and the kids.
Clinton may have grasped at the family-values lifeboat while adrift in a sea of
political weakness, retreat and opportunism, but the lifeboat was far less rudder-
less than he. In fact, a sophisticated, well-organized and remarkably successful new
family-values crusade commandeered Clintonʼs conversion. The distinctive sources,
rhetoric and tactics of this campaign merit careful scrutiny because they are likely to
enjoy much greater popularity in the UK than have those of the New Right. Whereas
old-style US family-values warriors, like Jerry Falwell, Dan Quayle and Pat Buchanan,
are right-wing Republicans and fundamentalist Christians – overtly anti-feminist,

2 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)

anti-homosexual, politically reactionary – the predominant 1990sʼ ʻfamily-valuesʼ
campaign represents itself as centrist, secular and ʻnonpartisanʼ. A product of academics
and politicians rather than clerics, it grounds its claims not in religious authority but
in social science, and promotes a gender ideology better characterized as post-feminist
than anti-feminist.
During the late 1980s, an interlocking network of research and policy institutes,
think-tanks, and commissions began mobilizing to forge a national consensus on family
values and to shape the family politics of the ʻnewʼ Democratic Party. Central were the
Institute for American Values (IAV), directed by David Blankenhorn, and its offshoot
the Council on Families in America, originally co-chaired by social scientists David
Popenoe and Jean Bethke Elshtain. The personnel, funding and programmes of IAV
overlap with those of sociologist Amitai Etzioniʼs Communitarian Agenda and with the
New Democratic Leadership Conference of the Democratic Party.

Virtual social science

Neo-family-values campaigners engage in a sophisticated practice of virtual social
science – public dissemination of selective representations of social science data in
order to transmute the hegemonic Western belief in the superiority of heterosexual,
married-couple families into social scientific ʻtruthʼ. For example, ʻin three decades of
work as a social scientistʼ, Popenoe asserted in the New York Times, ʻI know of few
other bodies of data in which the weight of evidence is so decisively on one side of the
issue: on the whole for children, two-parent families are preferable to single-parent and
stepfamilies.ʼ Claiming that research proves that parental divorce and unwed mother-
hood inflict devastating, unjustifiable harm on children, virtual social scientists are
waging a self-described ʻcultural crusadeʼ to restore social stigma to these practices.
During the 1990s, as family-values discourse became ever more ubiquitous on the
national political landscape, its central rhetorical focus began to shift from laments
over the social hazards of miscreant moms to those of missing dads. Books bemoaning
missing dads became the rage – from Blankenhornʼs Fatherless America, to Popenoeʼs
Life Without Father, and even one by former vice-president Dan Quayle, The American
Family. Quayleʼs opening chapter, ʻThe New Consensusʼ, begins: ʻAmerica has reached
a new consensus on the importance of the traditional family – a consensus unthinkable
just a few years ago.… Fathers do matter. Families are the basis of our society. We
must support the unified model of father, mother, and child.ʼ
The crusade to combat fatherlessness fans fears that it generates lawlessness.
Characteristic is an alarmist selection of correlational data published in the Chronicle
of Higher Education (9 February 1996): ʻIn the United States among boys aged 12 to
17, the percentage who are arrested for violent crime has doubled in the past 15 years.
Not coincidentally, the percentage of children under 18 who are being reared without
fathers, also has doubled during this period. Nationally, about 70% of school dropouts,
70% of teenage girls who are pregnant and unmarried, and 70% of incarcerated
juvenile delinquents were raised without fathers.ʼ As key source for some of these data
and analysis, the author cited Blankenhorn, who is not a social scientist: ʻFatherlessness
is the most harmful demographic trend of this generation. It is the leading cause of
declining child well-being in our society. It is also the engine driving our most urgent
social problems from crime to adolescent pregnancy to child sexual abuse to domestic
violence against women.ʼ
The claim that fatherlessness leads to lawlessness is approaching the status of
national dogma in the USA. Even Hillary Clintonʼs putatively liberal defence of child
welfare, It Takes a Village, succumbs to the doctrine, approvingly citing Daniel Patrick
Moynihanʼs mid-1960sʼ warning that ʻthe absence of fathers in the lives of children

Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 3

– especially boys – leads to increased rates of violence and aggressiveness, as well as
a general loss of the civilizing influence marriage and responsible parenthood histori-
cally provide any society.ʼ The US public seems to be absorbing the message. In a
1996 Gallup Poll, 79 per cent of those surveyed agreed with the statement ʻThe most
significant family or social problem facing America is the physical absence of the father
from the home.ʼ
The politics of fatherlessness is colouring a broad canvas of reactionary politics in
the USA. In some cases, the links are explicit or obvious. For example, family-values
crusaders cite the risks of fatherlessness in campaigns to reinstitute restrictions on
divorce. Some directly call for restricting access to sperm and fertility services to
heterosexual, married couples. Blankenhorn, for example, condemns donor insemination
for lesbians or unmarried heterosexual women: ʻState legislatures across the nation
should support fatherhood by regulating sperm banks. New laws should prohibit sperm
banks and others from selling sperm to unmarried women and limit the use of artificial
insemination to cases of married couples experiencing fertility problems. In a good
society, people do not traffic commercially in the production of radically fatherless
children.ʼ
Mainstream journalists quickly embraced these views. An article in US News and
World Report (15 May 1995) cited Blankenhorn as authority for the claim that ʻThe
consensus of studies is that no-father children, as a group, are at risk in all races and
at all income levels. If so, doesnʼt society have a stake in discouraging the intentional
creation of fatherless children?ʼ Similar concerns have appeared in even ostensibly
more liberal publications.

Displaced families, displaced politics

Some of the reactionary political effects of fatherless frenzy are more indirect, but pro-
found. The welfare overhaul bill of 1996 justified the draconian measures it was about
to enact in virtual social science rhetoric. ʻThe Congress makes the following findings
(my emphasis)ʼ, the bill announces, before listing family-values claims in defence
of its actions, such as, ʻ(1) Marriage is the foundation of a successful society; … (3)
Promotion of responsible fatherhood and motherhood is integral to successful child
rearing and the well-being of children; … (7) The negative consequences of an out-of-
wedlock birth on the mother, the child, the family and society are well documented as
followsʼ, and what follows is a series of misleading claims that out-of-wedlock children
are more likely to suffer child abuse, low cognitive attainment and lower educational
aspirations.
Of course, the actual body of research on the effects of father absence is far more
complex and contested, but belief in the destructive effects of fatherlessness itself
has destructive effects. It fuels reactionary initiatives injurious to vast numbers of
children and families and to the social fabric more generally. Jobs programmes and
health-insurance reforms that might have provided tangible relief to the growing ranks
of endangered actual families suffered catastrophic defeat after Clinton took office in
1993. Soon both parties employed family-values rhetoric to rationalize dismantling
the welfare state and shifting budget priorities from schools, social services and crime
prevention programmes to prisons and police. Legislators claimed that caps on eligibil-
ity for welfare benefits would reduce rates of ʻillegitimacyʼ and of the single-mother
families that they blame for the rising numbers of criminals in the USA.
In the name of The Family, legislators justify terminating public support for the
arts, humanities research and public broadcasting. They claim that artists like the late
gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe subject the young to corrosive sexual images
and ideas, as do publicly funded scholars, critics and journalists who canonize and
disseminate such work. Family-values rhetoric defeated Clintonʼs attempt to integrate

4 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)

gays openly into the military. It is being deployed to prevent sex education, the distribu-
tion of contraceptives to teenagers, and access to abortion. It was central to the rapid,
bipartisan passage of the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act.
Moreover, the politics of fatherlessness fosters support for knee-jerk quick fixes,
which are futile at best, and more likely to backfire. For, what if one believed (as many
social scientists like myself do not) that one family form is superior and that every
child should have a ʻrightʼ to a father? (Interestingly, few seem to concern themselves
with whether a child also has a right to a mother. The growing ranks of single-father
families seem to inspire few laments.) Even if one wished to combat ʻfatherlessnessʼ,
what could be done that would do children and their parents more good than harm?
While one cannot mandate or legislate the quality of intimate relationships, misguided
policies can readily make them worse.
For example, the family-values case against ʻdivorce cultureʼ has encouraged many
states to consider legislation to repeal no-fault divorce laws. Yet this poses even greater
dangers to women and children. Ironically, Barbara Whitehead, author of The Divorce
Culture, herself belatedly warned in the New York Times (13 January 1997) that
ʻrather than alleviating the damage divorce does to mothers and childrenʼ, repealing
no-fault ʻwill only make their situation worseʼ. Indeed, as Whitehead points out, it
will ʻintensify the pain of divorce for children. Nothing is more emotionally devastat-
ing to children than a prolonged conflict among their parents. Such friction will only
worsen if parents fight over who is at fault in the breakup. The children will be caught
in the crossfire.ʼ Battered women would have to mount dangerous, expensive court
battles against their abusers,
while emotionally desperate
spouses would find incentives
to fabricate abuse, to forfeit
economic support, or simply
to desert. Moreover, the repeal
of no-fault might easily induce
many men, as well as women,
to avoid legal marriage in the
first place. Just these sorts
of unintended consequences
recently led Roman Catholic
voters in the Irish Republic to
pass a constitutional amend-
ment to legalize divorce.
Likewise, hostility to
ʻfatherlessʼ lesbian families helped to justify the anti-gay and Orwellian titled Defense
of Marriage Act, a rash of state-level campaigns to prevent the legalization of same-
sex marriage, and proposals to restrict child custody and adoption rights to married,
heterosexual couples. Yet the most tangible effect of these assaults on the legitimacy
of lesbian-parent families is to deny stability, legitimacy, resources and respect to the
millions of children who now live in what are often invisible two-parent homes.
By far the most widespread tangible harm that contemporary idealization of The
Family will inflict on real families derives from its contribution to dismantling welfare,
which currently threatens millions of already impoverished children and their caretak-
ers with homelessness, malnutrition and devastation. It is difficult to imagine how such
measures will introduce fathers or any other benefits into the perilous lives of children
in such families.
In the end, however, it is difficult to believe that many family-values enthusiasts
care much about improving the lives of the members of most real ʻfatherlessʼ families.

Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 5

Instead, the politics of fatherlessness and family values are a politics of displacement.
They function as proxies for anti-feminist, anti-gay, xenophobic and anti-welfare
sentiments, which themselves displace direct engagement with the most fraught social
divisions and anxieties in the USA – gender, sexuality, race and class. They deflect
attention from the social sources of what they reify as personal or familial problems.
Thus, in a book that promotes school vouchers, tax cuts, divorce restrictions, prayer in
schools, and a full-scale conservative agenda, Dan Quayle dares to proclaim, ʻOn this,
weʼre all allies. Strengthening families should not be a political issue.ʼ Yet there is no
such thing as an apolitical platform for strengthening families, or even for agreeing on
a definition of the kind of family that ʻweʼ might wish to strengthen.
In the current conservative, anti-government, anti-tax and anti-spending climate,
family-values rhetoric advances profoundly political issues. By blaming massive, global
crises on individual moral failings and lapses of ʻpersonal responsibilityʼ, it rationalizes
a sweeping privatization of resources and responsibility. Unsurprisingly, therefore, as
the ʻglobal villageʼ erodes the gender division of labour and the male breadwinner wage
that underwrote The Family in industrial societies, family-values campaigns have begun
to spread to other postindustrial nations, and particularly to the UK. Observer column-
ist Melanie Phillips, for example, condemns the removal of fault criteria by the Family
Law Act while employing precisely the sort of postfeminist family-values rhetoric
that pervades US discourse. This transatlantic passage of the politics of family values
is not merely coincident. Not only do the same sort of demographic and economic
dislocations now threaten the UK welfare state; the UK is also particularly susceptible
to a direct US family-values export industry. Indeed, some of the very social scientists
who spearhead the US campaign, including sociologist Amitai Etzioni, have directly
influenced Blair and some of the British media.

A new pro-families agenda

How, then, might progressive intellectuals on either side of the Atlantic respond to
family-values frenzy? In the USA, we face quite a rearguard struggle in which I
consider it urgent to try to forge a centre-left coalition in support of pluralistic family
values and more progressive social policy. To do so requires entering the arena of
virtual social science ourselves to engage in cultural politics. To that end, a group
of family researchers, clinicians and theorists in the USA launched the Council on
Contemporary Families, which held its inaugural conference, ʻReframing the Politics
of Family Valuesʼ, in Washington DC in November 1997. The Council has begun a
public-education effort to challenge the simplistic claims about the sources and effects
of family diversity made by family-values campaigners (see our web site: http://www.
slip.net/~ccf/).
UK progressives, on the other hand, have a chance to derail the family-values tram
before it flattens all dissenting views. First, Blairʼs Labour government has to satisfy
a constituency more progressive and better organized than are most rank-and-file
Democrats in the USA. In fact, Melanie Phillips even charges that ʻnew Labour is
marching to a hard feminist tune: that the problems of lone parenthood and working
motherdom can be solved by childcare and we should support every family form
equally.ʼ She points to the creation of a minister for women but not one for family
as symptomatic of this bias. Moreover, while Blair may have lent Etzioni his ear, the
prime minister is receiving more extensive, frequent sociological counsel from Anthony
Giddens – theorist of the ʻpure relationshipʼ and no family-values fan. Thus, gazing
from the Atlanticʼs western shores, New Labour appears to offer far greater opportuni-
ties than the New Democrats to build a centre–left coalition in support of more inclu-
sive family and social values.

6 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)

 What is more, mounting a virtual social science campaign to support pluralist
family values and a progressive agenda can be done with integrity. Anyone with even
cursory knowledge of the social science literature who genuinely wished to reduce
fatherlessness and to strengthen most families would make it a political priority to
provide secure employment and a living family wage to all workers, and most urgently
to workers without a college education. After all, marriage rates generally rise and
divorce rates fall as one goes up the income and employment ladder. Those particu-
larly concerned about the declining ranks of ghetto fathers would try to redirect state
priorities from prisons to schools and to reduce the spread of firearms. After all, as
the grim findings in a 1997 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
demonstrate, the USA far exceeds the twenty-six richest countries in the world in losing
children to homicide, suicide and death by firearms. Almost three out of four violent
deaths of children in the industrialized world occur in the USA, and many more of the
murder victims are boys than girls. Since dead boys do not grow up to become fathers,
and incarcerated, unemployed and underemployed men make up much of the expanding
universe of missing dads, progressives can challenge family-values fans to address these
sources of the growing demographic imbalance between young women and men in our
most impoverished communities.
To exploit such opportunities, however, feminists and leftists on both sides of the
Atlantic need to shed lingering remnants of our historic antipathy to families as such.
While most family-values rhetoric is indeed anti-social, as The Anti-Social Family
by Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh argued long ago, families themselves are
inescapably social. More to the point, however, progressive social values are unlikely to
survive if they are presented or perceived as hostile to the survival of families. Hence,
those of us struggling against The Family as ideology should simultaneously struggle
for a comprehensive pro-families agenda.

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Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 7

Out of Africa
Philosophy, ‘race’ and agency

Bob Carter

Social scientists have long grappled with ideas about
race. In recent years, discussion on the significance of
these ideas – particularly in exploring notions of iden-
tity, and the cultural and political options these appear
to make available – have penetrated other areas of the
humanities. A spate of recent publications signals that
it is philosophyʼs turn to address some of the vexatious
issues this discussion raises.* Two such issues are raised
by the authors reviewed here: first, the possibility and
meaning of African philosophy and its relevance to
European traditions of social thought (Wiredu and the
two volumes edited by Eze); second, the significance of
race concepts to philosophy in general and the develop-
ment of a distinctively African-American philosophical
tradition in particular (Pittman and Outlaw). Although
there are some important overlaps between these issues
– for example, they both address questions to do with
anti-foundationalism, postmodernity, postcolonialism,
objectivity, and culture and agency – I propose to
consider each in turn.
Kwasi Wireduʼs Cultural Universals and Particu-
lars: An African Perspective sets out a propitiatory
case, insisting that what unifies us is more fundamen-
tal than what differentiates us. In a cogently argued
chapter, Wiredu rejects the ʻfacile universalismʼ of
Western Christian missionaries in their dealings with
African religions, whilst arguing for the importance of
ʻjudicious claims of universalityʼ (p. 31). These imply
that ʻcontending adults can, in principle, discuss their
differences rationally on a basis of equality, whether
inside identical cultures or across them.ʼ Wiredu sees
the human community as fundamentally united in
its activities of knowing and understanding – we all
think about more or less the same things – in which
communication is not only possible but ʻpervasive and
intensiveʼ. This makes it possible for human beings to
think astride conceptual networks and to access other
elements of the world of human thought.
The difficulties of this task are not minimized.
Wiredu spends an attentive and careful chapter explor-
ing the complexities of cross-cultural translation of
concepts in the human sciences, concluding reasonably
that such translation is not impossible but does require
a greater degree of conceptual self-consciousness
than the translation of natural science concepts. This
account draws on his own background in Akan thought
(the Akans constitute roughly half of the population
of Ghana, with a rich tradition of oral and written
philosophy, of which the most well-known represen-
tative is Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana) and
his training in European philosophy, and is a lively
demonstration of how a translator respectful of both
bodies of thought can bring out common themes and
interesting contrasts.
Wiredu is aware that this is not a fashionable
position, and that it renders uncertain the role and

*
Kwasi Wiredu, Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1997.
237 pp., £13.99 pb., 0 253 21080 1.
Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader, Blackwell, Oxford, 1997. ix + 166 pp., £40.00 hb.,
£12.99 pb., 0 631 20136 X hb., 0 631 20137 8 pb.
Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996. ix + 374 pp.,
£50.00 hb., £14.99 pb., 0 631 20339 7 hb., 0 631 20340 0 pb.
Lucius T. Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy, Routledge, London, 1996. xxxi + 232 pp., £40.00 hb., £13.99 pb., 0 415 91534 1
hb., 0 415 91535 X pb.
John P. Pittman, ed., African-American Perspectives and Philosophical Traditions, London, Routledge, 1997. xxii + 296 pp.,
£45.00 hb., £14.99 pb., 0 415 91639 9 hb., 0 415 91640 2 pb.

8 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)

meaning of African philosophy. In his discussion of
the debates in African philosophy between those who
see it as ʻcoterminous with philosophical investigations
having a special relevance to Africaʼ (p. 149) and
those of a more universalist outlook he comes down
emphatically on the side of the latter. Truth is true,
he notes, wherever it comes from.
This points to several conclusions about the role
of contemporary African philosophy. First, it is much
broader than a concern with traditional African thought.
Second, a concern with African thought is an indispen-
sable preparation for cross-cultural evaluations since
this requires conceptual clarity at both cultural ends.
Third, African philosophy has an important position
in the postcolonial world, partly as a challenge to the
neglect and disparagement of African thinkers and tra-
ditions of thought by Europeans, partly as the basis for
what Wiredu terms ʻconceptual self-exorcismʼ. Wiredu
regards this as a necessary response to the effects of
colonial domination – particularly the distortion of
African cultures (through ʻlong standing blandish-
ments, importunities and outright impositionsʼ) and
conceptual frameworks – through their ʻarticulation in
the medium of foreign categories of thoughtʼ. African
philosophy, in his view, is a necessary antidote to the
ʻinvoluntary mental de-Africanizationʼ that threatens
African thinkers.
This seems to me to jeopardize Wireduʼs robust
defence of a universalist view of African philosophy
and the possibilities of cross-cultural translation, for it
hints at a view of culture and thought as symbolically
consistent universes of shared meanings. I shall return
to an elaboration of this presently, but in Wireduʼs case
it highlights several tensions to do with the meaning
of the term ʻAfricanʼ and the relationship between
the ontological status of ideas and their generation by
groups and individuals inhabiting specific social and
historical locations. How, for example, is cross-cultural
translation to be distinguished from the ʻentanglementʼ
of ʻforeign categories of thoughtʼ? How is ʻproper
African thoughtʼ, free of colonial encrustations, to
be recognized? The term ʻEuropeanʼ (or ʻWesternʼ)
could, of course, be substituted for ʻAfricanʼ here
and the questions would remain pertinent, because at
their basis is a misconceived view of the relationship
between ideas and agency, between how we think
about the world and what we do with the ideas we
come up with. Simply, ideas do not have nationalities
or carry passports; human beings do. This is a point
Wiredu has made forcefully elsewhere,1 arguing that
African philosophy is simply that part of the universal
discourse of philosophy that is carried on by Africans;
reason is without colour.
The first of Ezeʼs readers, Race and the Enlighten-
ment, illustrates the shortcomings of an approach that
does not address this misconception. It is a useful and
attractively presented collection, assembling selections
from the texts of some key Enlightenment thinkers
– Kant, Hegel, Hume all figure here – in an attempt
to explore the question of whether or not, and in
what ways, race ideas might be a key component in
Enlightenment thought. Aligning himself with femi-
nist critics of the patriarchal nature of Enlightenment
reason, Eze seeks to demonstrate that the ʻAge of
Reasonʼ was predicated on the belief that reason could
only come to maturity in modern Europe. It therefore
consistently described and understood non-Europeans
as rationally inferior, discursively casting them as the
Other of European reason.
There are several different arguments elided in
this account. Certainly the extracts demonstrate the
prejudices about Africa and Africans held by European
philosophers, from Kantʼs ʻThis fellow was quite black
… a clear proof that what he said was stupidʼ, to
Hegelʼs assertion that non-European peoples are less
human than Europeans because they are not fully
aware of themselves as conscious, historical beings.
By and large, these thinkers drew on commonplace
ideas about race and colour as a means of classifying
and ordering human populations. The question is: what
are we to make of this?
Eze has an unequivocal answer. Enlightenment
philosophy, he avers, ʻwas instrumental in codifying
and institutionalizing both the scientific and popular
European perceptions of the human raceʼ (p. 5). These
writings played ʻa strong role in articulating Europeʼs
sense not only of its cultural but also racial superior-
ityʼ (p. 5). They were able to do this because they
provided an identifiable scientific and philosophical
vocabulary – about ʻraceʼ, ʻprogressʼ, ʻcivilizationʼ
and the like – constitutive of an intellectual world-
view. With a little Foucauldian jiggery-pokery this
becomes a ʻuniverse of discourseʼ which ʻdetermines
… not only how studies are done, but also what are
constituted as objects of scientific, philosophical, or
cultural studyʼ (p. 7).
The problem is that beyond the averral, there is an
acute shortage of evidence to support these ambitious
propositions. From the modest, and I suspect largely
accurate, charge that some of the key figures in Euro-
pean philosophy during the seventeenth, eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, notwithstanding their con-
siderable philosophical accomplishments, shared with
many of their less cerebral contemporaries uninformed
and ignorant views of people of colour, we shift quickly
Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 9
to altogether grander pronouncements about ʻpopular
European perceptionsʼ. In expressing such views, no
doubt, Kant, Hume and others gave authority and
legitimacy to ideas about race and colour; there can
also be little question that such views proved useful
to those who wished to defend colonialism, slavery or
other exploitative and inequitable social arrangements.
This, though, does not amount to a ʻcodification and
institutionalization of European popular perceptionsʼ,
at least not without a more considered account of the
relationship between philosophical ideas and social
agency.
The themes of colonialism and European modernity
are pursued in more detail in Ezeʼs other edited col-
lection, Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical
Reader. This provides an excellent introduction to
the complex issues of postcolonialism and African
philosophy, and one that reflects the liveliness, variety
and rigour of a growing area of debate. Eze pro-
vides an introductory essay in which he argues that
colonialism, ʻthe brutal encounter of the African world
with European modernityʼ (p. 4), is the single most
important factor driving the field of African phil-
osophy. The latter thus has two tasks: a critique of
how the intellectual and philosophical production of
Europe ʻjustified imperialism and colonialismʼ; and the
understanding and articulation of Africaʼs experience
of European modernity.
Again, the conflationary impulse to posit ideas as
inseparable from their concrete historical realization
by specific social actors pushes towards a sort of ʻbig
actor scenarioʼ in which huge, reified concepts like
Africa and Europe square up and do things to each
other: ʻBy dialectically negating Africa, Europe was
able to posit and represent itself and its contingent
history as the ideal culture, the ideal humanity, and
the ideal historyʼ (p. 13). This not only overstates
the role of ideas and their influence, but inhibits an
account of the conditions of their production and of
their relations to the political interests of groups and
collectivities.
Other contributions to this lively volume register
some unease about the notions of ʻpostcolonialityʼ
and its historical tasks. Kwame Gyekye, for example,
argues for a political definition of the term, suggesting
that it refers to the era of political independence of
African states from European colonial power, whilst
Leonard Harris is deeply critical of the very notion
of the postcolonial, pointing to its theoretical incon-
gruities and its political impotence. More crucial res-
ervations emerge around two further, interconnected
themes: the meaning of tradition and its relation to
10 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)
cultural and political identities; and the relation and
relevance of African philosophy to African-American
philosophy and politics. These motifs are explored
in all the texts reviewed here, although with differ-
ing emphases. In Postcolonial African Philosophy: A
Critical Reader the issue of tradition and identity is
to the fore and focuses on the bald question: what is
African philosophy?
Obvious descriptive replies to this quickly become
bogged down in exceptions that eventually render
the question nugatory. Is it philosophy carried out
in Africa? Is it philosophy dealing with Africa? Is
it philosophy done by Africans? Living in Africa or
elsewhere? (We can ask the same questions of Euro-
pean philosophy, of course, with pretty much the same
consequences.) Hence, several of the authors in this
volume see hermeneutics as providing the means by
which answers may be developed.
Peter Amatoʼs essay is an intriguing example.
He uses hermeneutics to question the counterposing
of reason to culture and tradition which, he claims,
characterizes Western modernityʼs own philosophical
prejudgements. Against this, reason needs to be placed,
Gadamer-like, within culture – sagacity should be a
conscious movement from one cultural particularity
towards a plurality of particularities, a constant inter-
play between oneʼs own cultural embeddedness and
the shifting horizon of an ever-widening set of cultural
resources. In the spirit of this position, Western phil-
osophers should recognize that the cultural productions
and forms of thought of those ʻbeyond its self imposed
boundariesʼ (p. 86) can be legitimately philosophical,
rational and modern. There are rich and audacious
philosophical traditions in Africa (amply represented
by the writers in this volume) by means of which the
horizons of European philosophy could be broadened
immeasurably. Understanding, Amato sharply notes,
ʻis a matter of bringing traditions into active cor-
respondence, not pretending to speak ʻReasonʼ and
waiting for the Other to learn its languageʼ (p. 92).
A hermeneutic approach is also endorsed by Bruce
Janz in another essay in this volume. He stresses its
importance for African philosophy as a means of
pushing the issue of self-understanding to a new level,
since a truly African philosophy is ʻnot one which
ignores outside influences, but one which is able to
root them in its own soilʼ (p. 235). This points to
the difficulty with adopting such approaches, namely
that sooner or later the boundaries of a tradition, the
nature and limits of ʻits own soilʼ, have to be specified.
If this is not done, the fluid notion of tradition as
an oscillation between cultural particularity and the
horizon of universal rationality ossifies into a trans-
cendent category. Two difficulties then arise. The first
is that avoiding some form of essentialism becomes
something of a quandary. Janz, for example, ponders
the question ʻis there an African way in which African
philosophy can understand itself?ʼ (p. 233). I do not
think that there is a satisfactory way of answering this,
partly because I am not sure that it is a meaningful
question. The second difficulty is that the ʻmyth of
cultural integrationʼ, to borrow a phrase from Archer,2
is firmly reinstated.
Briefly, the ʻmyth of cultural integrationʼ portrays
culture as a perfectly integrated system, as a community
of shared meanings. It thereby elides community with
meanings. Community has to do with how groups and
individuals pursue interests within the contexts of
cultural values and norms, and therefore the extent of
their commitment to these norms, whereas meanings
are to do with the relations between the components of
culture, especially their degree of logical consistency.
The myth allows one to argue that by identifying a
coherent body of ideas – humanistic Marxism, say,
or Protestantism, or Islam or Judaism – one has also
identified a culture or tradition constituted by all those
who assent to these ideas. This accounts for the attrac-
tion of hermeneutics for Amato, Janz and Jean-Marie
Makang in the present collection. There is a price to
pay for this, though. Few of the contributors develop
a philosophical engagement with African ideas or
thinkers; rather, the concern is more with defending
and explicating a notion of African philosophy as a
tradition in the sense just depicted.
The enduring advantages of this strategy are well
illustrated by Makangʼs essay. After a powerful critique
of the ʻcolonial ontology of participationʼ (p. 325) in
which Africans were discursively construed in various
inferior ways to their European colonizers and were
stripped of their ʻhistoricity, diversity and conflicts of
interestsʼ (p. 325), he moves on to
the tasks of African philosophy.
Here the myth of cultural inte-
gration melds with hermeneutics
to produce an African philosophy
that trans-cends its spatial loca-
tion through its ability to face the
challenges which confront ʻpeople
of African descentʼ:
What unites the African people
of the continent with those of the
Diaspora is not only the fact that
they descend from people whose
homeland is Africa, but also the
fact that they share a common
historical consciousness, and are
linked by the same destiny and the
same hope for a full realization of
their humanity. (p. 325)
This would appear to leave little
room for the ʻhistoricity, diversity
and conflicts of interestsʼ of African
peoples living in Africa, let alone
those scattered around the world.
Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 11
This tension between the hermeneutic recovery and/or
development of an authentically African philosophy
and the strategic desire to press it into the service of a
larger project of identity formation, particularly in the
context of US ʻrace politicsʼ, becomes more evident in
the final two books under consideration here.
Pittmanʼs edited collection African-American
Perspectives and Philosophical Traditions marks the
shift of emphasis explicitly with its title. Readers not
familiar with US debates about affirmative-action pro-
grammes and the campaigns for faculty diversity may
find the last section rather narrow in focus. The other
sections, though, provide a splendidly conspectual
view of the current state of play in the sometimes
fierce debates about African-American philosophy,
its role in the ʻrace politicsʼ of the US academy and
more broadly in the formation of political identities in
a nation-state characterized by enormous inequalities
and discrimination. Many key figures are represented
in these writings (a notable exception is Cornel West)
and this text would certainly be a good place to start
a crash course in current US thinking about colour,
philosophy and racism.
Commendably, it does not seek to avoid awkward
questions. Briefly, these have to do, first, with the
identification of a dominant European tradition, whose
ʻabsolute, foundationalist standpointʼ, to use Pittmanʼs
description, has silenced the voices of excluded others
and sought to impose a (white) Western notion of
reason; and, second, with the role of ʻraceʼ in defining
political identities and philosophical traditions capable
of challenging ʻthe socially constructed canons of the
dominant traditionsʼ (Pittman again). The authors in
this volume, unsurprisingly perhaps, find it difficult to
arrive at common answers.
Pittman, in his Introduction and opening essay, puts
the case for the prosecution succinctly. He situates
himself and, by implication, African-American philo-
sophical traditions as part of the effort to ʻsubstitute
for the foundationalist dream of a purely rational
language of truth a sensitivity to and exploration of
the actually existing plurality of contingent social
practicesʼ (p. ix). As in the texts reviewed earlier, this
project is bolstered by the claim that the ʻdominant
European philosophical traditionʼ has been complicit
in the exclusion of people of colour – and their intel-
lectual and moral traditions – from ʻparticipation in
the centers of power of Western civilizationʼ (p. x).
This is another consequence of the myth of cultural
integration: the ahistorical privileging of ideas and
traditions. Again, this is not to deny that philosophical
ideas to do with colour, Africa and innate inferiority
12 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)
of the sort illustrated in Ezeʼs reader Race and the
Enlightenment have been deployed to justify exclusion
and discrimination; but they have been deployed by
groups and individuals, for particular purposes and in
particular circumstances. Unless these are specified we
are left with the strong imputation that the European
philosophical tradition (is this meant to include anti-
foundationalists such as Wittgenstein, Kuhn, Feyer-
abend, Rorty, Harding or Max Weber?) has itself an
interest in accomplishing these ends.
Behind Pittmanʼs charge, and constituting the criti-
cal standpoint from which the European philosophical
tradition is both demarcated and challenged, is the
hovering presence of ʻraceʼ. It is ʻraceʼ that marks out
the counter-position of the African-American tradition.
The problem of what is meant by it, and of how it
relates to philosophy and to political practices, is a
central thread running through all the essays in this
collection. Pittman opts for a social and historical
definition, arguing that racism is a universal in the
experiences of people of colour and it is this common
history of oppression that justifies the use of a category
of ʻraceʼ. Furthermore, since the African-American
tradition is constituted through the very process of
opposition to a dominant European tradition, it is fun-
damentally antithetical to a Eurocentric, foundational-
ist Reason. ʻRaceʼ, Pittman observes, ʻ is something
we do as much as something we areʼ (p. xvii).
Frank M. Kirkland, in a later essay in this volume,
opts for a more modest, discursive role for ʻraceʼ,
using the term to describe the use of race notions in
everyday encounters. In this illuminating discussion of
the work of the nineteenth-century intellectual Alex-
ander Crummell, Kirkland also registers misgivings
about regarding ʻraceʼ as some sort of ʻgroup spiritʼ
in the Pittman sense. Tommy L. Lott, on the other
hand, turns to the work of W.E.B. DuBois in defence
of a social-historical view of ʻraceʼ. In a detailed
and engaging account, Lott examines DuBoisʼs efforts
to develop nonbiological criteria for a definition of
ʻraceʼ. He argues that for DuBois ʻraceʼ was a politi-
cal project in which African-Americans would invent
a conception of themselves that would contribute to
their political and social elevation. The nature of the
African-American contribution to US life could only
be established if African-Americans themselves were
clear about what that contribution was. This leaves
unresolved the question of what constitutes African-
American culture and of the relation between this and
political identities. After all, to say, as Lott claims
DuBois is doing, that the strength of a group lies in
its cultural integrity rather than in biologically fixed
 of what philosophy can contribute
to current thinking about racism,
inequality and injustice. On the
other hand, the discussion of
affirmative action by Anita L.
Allen, and that of alienation by
Howard McGary, seem to rest on
unspecific claims about, respec-
tively, the effects of role models on
student achievement and the effects
of community support in reducing
alienation. Both reproduce many
of the difficulties associated with a
concept of race, difficulties which
are encountered directly in the
final book under review.
Lucius T. Outlawʼs On Race and
Philosophy again has a slightly
misleading title: rather than a text
exploring the philosophical dimen-
sions of ideas or propositions about
race or what philosophy might
bring to our understanding of a
dangerously protean concept, we
categories still requires some specification of how, and
have a sustained and complex argument about the
in what ways, culture gives rise to community.
place and the tasks of ʻAfricana philosophyʼ. Although
This point is driven home by Anthony K. Appiahʼs
Outlaw insists that the term ʻAfricana philosophyʼ is a
essay in the same volume (he has also made it exten-
ʻgathering notionʼ, and not a proxy for an immutable
sively elsewhere3). Arguing against the notion that
essence shared by all Africans, his unsteady combin-
ideas constitute communities – what he terms ʻethno-
ation of genetics and ʻmyth of cultural integrationʼ
philosophyʼ – Appiah urges a view of intellectuals as
hermeneutics is unpersuasive.
rational burrowers in a Popperian ʻWorld Threeʼ and
Outlawʼs case for Africana philosophy is as follows
whose perspective has necessarily to be comparative,
(a concise version of this appears in his essay in the
integrative and critical of the ʻcozy celebration of
Pittman volume). First, it coincides with the situated
oneʼs own conceptual and theoretical resourcesʼ (p.
practices and experiences (ʻlife worldsʼ) of ʻa dispersed
22). Consistently, he also rejects the notion that there
geographic raceʼ – that is, ʻa group of persons and
is some key body of ideas shared by (black) Africans
peoples with a shared ancestry and descentʼ4 (my
generally and raises the correlative question of what
italics), who share therefore a relatively permanent
relevance African philosophy might have for African-
place of geographical origin and a relatively distinct
Americans.
gene pool. These factors hold even in diasporic con-
The last part of this lively collection deals with
ditions. In turn the situated practices and experiences
another aspect of African-American philosophy: the
influence the gene pool and cultural practices to con-
application of philosophical concepts to the explora-
dition raciation – that is, the formation and evolu-
tion of racism and exclusion in contemporary USA.
tion of the biological and cultural factors collectively
These include Adrian M. Piperʼs stimulating efforts
characterizing the race. Raciation is an ʻimportant
to develop an account of xenophobia using Kantʼs
means through which we construct and validate our-
notion of personhood (an interesting exegesis with
selvesʼ, and for this and other reasons ʻwe should
much to say about xenophobia as a psycho-biographi-
understand races … as natural, that is as particular
cal strategy); Laurence Thomasʼs deployment of the
types of bio-social collectivities that develop or evolve,
notion of moral deference in enabling people to think
as do all things in the natural world, but in ways that
differently about each other; and Michelle M. Moody-
are characteristically humanʼ (pp. 11–12). So African
Adamsʼs account of the impact of discrimination and
philosophy rests on the existence of an African ʻraceʼ,
exclusion on self-respect. All are compelling examples

Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 13

defined in terms of common ancestry and descent, and
a genetic pool that is somehow affected by practice
and experience.
Second, then, it is defined ex post facto by those
who decide what constitutes African philosophy. It is
African because it is done by, or is about, Africans;
and it is philosophy because Outlaw describes it as
such, a strategy allowed for by the claim that what
counts as philosophy is a product of local conven-
tion – the shared unities of life-world conditions and
practices is sufficient for the discursive declaration
of a disciplinary field of ʻAfrican philosophyʼ. Third,
Africana philosophy is distinguished by the dual effort
(a) to ʻforge and articulate new identities and life
agendasʼ to deal with racism and discrimination and
the difficulties of ʻNew world relocationsʼ and (b) ʻto
recover or reconstruct life-defining meaning connec-
tions to the lands and cultures of the African continentʼ
through a ʻhermeneutics of black folks … aim[ing] at
the full disclosure of the life worlds of black people,
our life praxesʼ (p. 30). This seems to insist on a
definition of philosophy which eliminates precisely
what Wiredu, Appiah, Gyekye and others would insist
is distinctive in philosophical thinking.
Africana philosophers thus have a particular agenda:
to rethink the history of Western philosophy and its
relations to Africa and its peoples; to rehabilitate
African thinkers; and to deconstruct and revise philo-
sophical narratives in the West. In combination these
tasks ensure that attempts to develop an African-Amer-
ican philosophy are necessarily deconstructive since
they must challenge the Eurocentricity of dominant
traditions of philosophizing. Despite its emphasis on
shared destinies and ancestry, then, and a touchingly
old-fashioned attachment to the claim that ʻtheorizing
is a form of social praxisʼ (a catchphrase by means of
which academics have often sought to give themselves
consequence), Outlawʼs book draws freely on post-
modern themes. (The Western European provenance
of these themes, incidentally, appears not to be as
disabling as Outlaw might contend.) The ʻruptures and
challengesʼ of Africana philosophy unsettle the false
unity of foundationalist Reason, whilst the conventional
nature of truth permits a discursive redefinition of the
philosophical enterprise. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, this
gives rise to some tensions in his defence of African
philosophy.
The most fundamental of these surrounds his view
of ʻraceʼ as a bio-social collectivity, which seems to
me a bad case of wanting the best of both worlds.
Clearly for the task Outlaw wants to set for Africana
philosophy, a modest definition – regarding race ideas,
14 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)
for example, as propositions about the world, or as ele-
ments in common sense, practical consciousness – will
not do. Africana philosophy, like European philosophy
or Indian philosophy, would then be merely a descrip-
tor, a taxonomic convenience whose availability and
relevance to those other than ʻblack folksʼ is ensured by
the public nature of academic discourse. Furthermore,
a consistent anti-foundationalism such as Outlaw pro-
poses swiftly renders problematic notions of African
and African-descended bio-social collectivities (recall
Appiahʼs scepticism from Pittmanʼs earlier volume). So
there must be something about ʻAfricansʼ that gives
Africana philosophy its distinctiveness. Hence the turn
to hermeneutics and biological attributes, life worlds
and gene pools.
The problem Outlaw faces here is one that faces
all attempts to mobilize notions of ʻraceʼ, as Appiah
notes: the relationship between biology, culture and
destiny inescapably issues in some form of undesir-
able essentialism (undesirable in the sense of being
ahistorical, asociological, aphilosophical and, one
might add, unworkable). Outlaw is no exception: ʻWhat
makes it possible and appropriate initially to group
diverse intellectual endeavors of diverse persons under
a single heading[?]ʼ he asks. It ʻis the extent to which
the persons share racial-ethnic identities as African and
African-descended, thus share socially and culturally
conditioned biological attributes, cultural traditions,
and historical experiences more or less distinctive of
the African race and its ethniesʼ (p. 88).
This notion of races as communities of meaning
based on shared ʻracial-ethnic identitiesʼ – groups
of people who look roughly alike and who ʻshareʼ a
body of cultural norms and values (authentic cultural
life worlds) – leads to a selective application of the
ʻdifference and diversity principleʼ. Recognizing that
ʻDifference has become a significant basis of politi-
cal mobilization … a highly valued preference that
many persons and groups would have accommodated
and recognized as the basis for their participation in
civic, political and economic lifeʼ (p. 140) does not
apparently allow for difference between those sharing
a common culture on the basis of their ʻracial-ethnic
identityʼ. (I am drawing a veil over the sociologically
dubious notion of sharing a common culture, the
problems of empirical demonstration associated with
it, and the illegitimate way in which it assumes what
it purports to discover.)
Outlawʼs is a bold book and its strains are very
much the consequence of trying to renovate a notion
of ʻraceʼ as a viable social category with some explana-
tory purchase. This enterprise has a long history in
the USA, from Alexander Crummell and Frederick
Douglass through DuBois, Martin Luther King and
Malcolm X to Louis Farrakhan – a history to a great
extent impelled by the experience of coping with
racism and exclusion. It is also a history in which com-
munal resources have been crucial in ameliorating the
damaging effects of a racist society. It is a moot point,
though, how far a notion of ʻraceʼ takes us in making
philosophical (or indeed any other) sort of sense of
this. Notions of race always embroil their sponsors in
shady deals with disreputable claims about common
destinies and traditions, life worlds and genes. ʻWe
will only solve our problemsʼ, observes Appiah, ʻif
we see them as human problems arising out of a
special situation, and we shall not solve them if we
see them as African problems, generated by our being
somehow unlike others.ʼ5 If the ʻOther-nessʼ machine
is to be jammed, then that part of Wireduʼs ʻuniversal
discourse of philosophyʼ that is carried on by Afri-
cans cannot be confined to issues of ʻraceʼ, or to the
construction of political communities and theoretical
traditions grounded in the lingering essentialisms of
ʻracial-ethnicʼ identity.
The wide range of issues raised by these texts
highlights the varying, and conflicting, senses in which
a term such as ʻAfrican philosophyʼ may be under-
stood. Wireduʼs argument that what makes a concept
interesting is not whose it is but what it is and how it
deals with the realities that face those whose concept
it is suggests a possible exit from the fruitless search
for ʻauthentic African-nessʼ. Following his hint, we
might distinguish between philosophy as a Popperian
World Three enterprise, considering particular sorts
of concepts, ideas and propositions in a distinctive
manner, and philosophy as a social practice, enmeshed
in unequal and discriminatory textual relations of
production. In the first case, the notion of an African
philosophy makes no more sense than a European or
a male or a white philosophy. In the second case, how-
ever, those seeking to challenge prejudice, discrimin-
ation and inequality may find in the notion of an
African philosophy a powerful mobilizing force.
Notes
I would like to thank the following people for their helpful
comments on an earlier draft of this essay: Alan How, Kevin
Magill, Alison Sealey and Lesley Spiers.
1. Kwasi Wiredu, Philosophy and an African Culture,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980.
2. Margaret S. Archer, Culture and Agency: The Place of
Culture in Social Theory, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1989.
3. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Fatherʼs House:
Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, Oxford University
Press, Oxford, 1992.
4. Lucius T. Outlaw, ʻAfrican, African American, Africana
Philosophyʼ, in John P. Pittman, ed., African-American
Perspectives and Philosophical Traditions, Routledge,
London 1997, p. 72.
5. Appiah, In My Fatherʼs House, p. 136.

conference 1998
call for papers

philosophy and race

Papers or abstracts are invited on the broad theme of ‘Philosophy and Race’
– Philosophy of race and ethnicity / Philosophical analyses of racial conflict /
Racism in philosophy / African-American philosophy / Race and multiculturalism,
and other relevant areas

Confirmed speakers include

Linda Martín Alcoff, Bikhu Parekh, Naoki Sakai, Bob Carter

Papers or abstracts by 1st July 1998 to Stella Sandford,

Middlesex University, White Hart Lane, London N17 8HR
S.Sandford@mdx.ac.uk

Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 15

Adorno on late capitalism
Totalitarianism and the welfare state
Deborah Cook
In his appraisal of mass societies, Theodor W. Adorno
briefly discussed those changes in Western economies
that had helped to transform the earlier liberal phase
of ʻfree marketʼ capitalism at the turn of the twen-
tieth century. Responding in part to these changes,
governments legislated into existence social welfare
institutions and agencies that quickly became more
or less permanent fixtures in their liberal democratic
states. Even as he recognized that the welfare state
had alleviated some of the inequities caused by capi-
talism, Adorno was also concerned about the loss of
individual autonomy and spontaneity that seemed to
accompany its emergence. He was very critical of
the increasingly oppressive extension of bureaucratic
state agencies into the private lives of individuals,
warning that state control might reach totalitarian
proportions, even in purportedly democratic countries.
Observing that individuals were growing more and
more dependent on the state as its powers increased,
and noting their often servile deference to the rule of
ʻexpertsʼ and technocrats, Adorno feared that individu-
als would relinquish the independence which serves as
a necessary condition for resistance to repression and
economic exploitation.
A number of commentators have misleadingly
maintained that Adorno viewed the welfare state as
a variant of what an associate and co-worker at the
Institute for Social Research was calling ʻstate capi-
talismʼ. Simply put, with his state capitalism thesis,
Friedrich Pollock alleged that the command and mixed
economies of the 1920s and 1930s marked the ʻtransi-
tion from a predominantly economic to an essentially
political eraʼ.1 Initially, this state capitalism thesis will
be contrasted with Adornoʼs own view of twentieth-
century liberal democracies. Later in the article, I
16 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)
shall assess Adornoʼs position in light of contemporary
criticisms that have been levelled against his work.
This evaluation of Adornoʼs work is not only necessary
to correct the secondary literature; it will also provide
the opportunity to flesh out Adornoʼs ideas about
the relationship between the state and the economy
– ideas which, though sketchy, nonetheless implicitly
occupied an important place in his work as a whole.
In addition, these ideas may help to reframe histori-
cal and theoretical considerations about the role that
democratic political systems have played, and might
yet play, in capitalist economies.
Pollock and Neumann on the Third Reich
During the 1930s and 1940s, Pollock tried to account
for what was being viewed as a new development
within the capitalist economies of the West. With
the command economy of the Third Reich, and the
mixed economy of the United States (represented by
the New Deal), a qualitative shift had taken place such
that the earlier liberal phase of capitalism had been
superseded by either totalitarian or non-totalitarian
(formal democratic) variants of state capitalism. Prod-
uction and distribution in the economies of these and
other countries were increasingly being taken under
direct political or state control. Acknowledging that
industrial and business managers continue to play an
important role in the newer phase, Pollock nonetheless
maintained that the profit motive had been supplanted
by the power motive in command or mixed economies.
Of course, profits still accrue to producers under state
capitalism, but they can now often be made only when
goods are produced in accordance with the ʻgeneral
planʼ of a state or political party. Pollock further
believed that by establishing wage and price controls,
the state also succeeded in controlling distribution
either through direct allocation to consumers or via a
ʻpseudo-marketʼ that served to regulate consumption.
Pollock recognized that his thesis was not new;
a number of writers had already studied the ways
in which liberal economies had increasingly come
under the control of the state. At the same time, he
also admitted that his state capitalism thesis could
not be verified empirically in every respect. Con-
structed ʻfrom elements long visible in Europe and,
to a certain degree in Americaʼ, the thesis was meant
to serve only as a model, a Weberian ʻideal typeʼ.2
Moreover, although ʻthe trend toward state capital-
ism was growing … in the non-totalitarian statesʼ,
Pollock thought that relatively little work had been
devoted to understanding the democratic form of state
capitalism; a more comprehensive model still needed
to be constructed for it.3 Additional research was
also required to determine whether democracy could
survive under state capitalism. While control over the
economy might remain in the hands of a small political
group or faction, Pollock speculated that, in the long
run, economic planning could be carried out more or
less democratically.
Pollockʼs thesis generated some controversy among
his co-workers at the Institute for Social Research.
One of these was Franz Neumann, a lawyer and
administrator for the Institute who later worked as an
economist for the United States government during
World War II. In his Behemoth – which offers a
detailed analysis of economic conditions under the
Third Reich – Neumann launched a qualified attack
on Pollockʼs view that Germany could be described as
state capitalist. He argued that Pollockʼs state capital-
ism thesis actually amounted to the claim that there
was no longer any freedom of trade, contract, or
investment under National Socialism; that Germanyʼs
market had been abolished; that the German state had
complete control over wages and prices, eliminating
exchange value; and that labour was now appropriated
by a ʻpolitical actʼ.4 Neumann called this thesis into
question, showing that the National Socialists had no
economic theory of their own, and rejecting the idea
that Nazi Germany was organized along corporat-
ist lines. He also demonstrated that private property
and private control over capital had been retained in
Hitlerʼs regime.
At the same time, however, Neumann did concede
that, in Nazi Germany, ʻpossession of the state machin-
ery … is the pivotal question around which every-
thing else revolvesʼ. And, for Neumann, this was ʻthe
only possible meaning of the primacy of politics over
economicsʼ.5 On Neumannʼs assessment, the National
Socialist economy had two general characteristics:
it was ʻa monopolistic economy – and a command
economyʼ, a conjunction for which Neumann coined
the term ʻtotalitarian monopoly capitalismʼ. In other
words, the German economy under the Third Reich
was ʻa private monopolistic economy, regimented by
the totalitarian stateʼ.6 Recognizing, then, that aspects
of a command economy had been put into place,
Neumann proceeded to examine the extent of the
German stateʼs intervention in the economy, taking
into account the stateʼs direct economic activities, its
control over prices, investments, profits, foreign trade
and labour, and the role of the National Socialist Party.7
He concluded that economic activity in the Third
Reich had preserved much of its former autonomy.
However, owing to the way in which the economy
had been monopolized by large industrial and business
concerns, profits could not be ʻmade and retained
without totalitarian political powerʼ.8 This is allegedly
what distinguished Nazi Germany from other Western
states (though, given the growing monopoly on capital
in these other states, one has to wonder why totalitarian
political power arose only in Nazi Germany).
Commentators on this debate between Pollock and
Neumann often maintain that Adorno simply adopted
Pollockʼs state capitalism thesis in his own analyses of
developments in the West. For example, Helmut Dubiel
believes that both Adorno and Max Horkheimer sided
with Pollock, adapting his argument to their assess-
ment of changes in the development of capitalism.9
David Held agrees with Dubiel; and like Dubiel, Held
also refers to Dialectic of Enlightenment by way of
substantiation without quoting relevant passages from
this work in order to support his view.10 Nevertheless,
Held also points out that Horkheimer and Adorno
expressed ambivalence about this thesis in their later
work. Referring to Adorno, Held notes that, ʻThough
the main principles which underpin his view of capital-
ism are compatible with Pollockʼs position, a reading
of essays like ʻGesellschaftʼ [Society] (1966) and
ʻSpätkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft?ʼ [Late
Capitalism or Industrial Society?] (1968) suggest …
that while Adorno thought that class conflict and crisis
can potentially be managed, he did not think that they
would necessarily be managed successfully.ʼ11
In his recent work on Neumannʼs and Otto Kirch-
heimerʼs critique of the liberal rule of law under
the welfare state, William Scheuerman also refers to
Dialectic of Enlightenment (again without quoting it
directly) to substantiate his claim that Horkheimer and
Adorno adopted Pollockʼs state capitalism thesis in
Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 17
order to explain both the ʻtotally administered worldʼ
in non-totalitarian countries and ʻthe Nazisʼ success
in overcoming all the tensions that had plagued earlier
forms of capitalismʼ.12 Theoretical and political differ-
ences subsequently emerged between Neumann and
Kirchheimer in the eastern United States, and Pollock,
Horkheimer and Adorno in the West – differences
that ended in the break-up of the original Frankfurt
School. In his own assessment of Adornoʼs work,
Douglas Kellner makes a similar point: ʻAlthough
Pollockʼs theses were sharply disputed by Grossmann,
Neumann and the more orthodox Marxian members of
the Institute …, in various ways Horkheimer, Adorno
and Marcuse built their theory of the transition to a
new stage of capitalism on Pollockʼs analysis, while
developing their Critical Theory of contemporary
society from this vantage point.ʼ13
What is surprising about Kellnerʼs interpretation of
Adorno is that Kellner also recognizes that Adorno was
highly critical of Pollockʼs thesis. In a letter to Hork-
heimer, cited by Kellner, Adorno wrote that Pollockʼs
essay ʻwas marred by the “undialectical position that
in an antagonistic society a non-antagonistic economy
was possible”ʼ.14 Adorno maintained that Pollockʼs
thesis failed to take into account the crisis-ridden
nature of capitalism in the 1930s. In fact, Pollock
had argued that the newly politicized economic order
could respond to all the problems that had arisen in
the earlier liberal phase and resolve successfully all the
economic difficulties it might confront – albeit possibly
only through totalitarian means. In what follows, I
want to present Adornoʼs own discussion of the more
salient features of late capitalism (or the phase of
capitalism that succeeds its liberal ʻfree marketʼ stage).
I shall begin by examining Adornoʼs earlier work and
then present some of his later ideas on the connections
between the economy and the state in the West.
Adorno and Horkheimer on
‘late capitalism’
In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno
wrote that life under capitalism was becoming com-
pletely administered, taken under control by various
agencies, organizations and institutions in the West.
They used the phrase ʻtotally administered worldʼ
to describe conditions in the newer economic phase,
and warned of their oppressive effects. Yet it is not
immediately apparent that the authors thought that
administration in Western states was state capitalist in
character. In fact, there are few passages in Dialectic
of Enlightenment which confirm the view that Adorno
and Horkheimer simply adopt wholesale Pollockʼs state
18 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)
capitalism thesis – even as an ideal type. Although the
authors write in their introduction that individuals have
become ʻtotally devalued in relation to the economic
powers, which at the same time press the control of
society over nature to hitherto unsuspected heightsʼ,15
they do not claim that these economic powers have
been taken under state control. Moreover, throughout
the main body of the text, Horkheimer and Adorno
were largely concerned with describing the impact of
an ostensibly apolitical capitalistic economic ʻappara-
tusʼ on the individual. It is the primacy of the economy,
not of politics or ʻstate capitalismʼ, that looms largest
in their analysis.
Contrasting the ruling ʻcliques which ultimately
embody economic necessityʼ16 to the general directors
(Generaldirektoren) who execute as ʻresults … the old
law of value and hence the destiny of capitalismʼ,17
Horkheimer and Adorno imply that the former operate
more or less independently of the latter, and that eco-
nomic (not political) laws govern both. In their chapter
on the myth of Odysseus, the authors coin the phrase
ʻtotalitarian capitalismʼ (totalitärer Kapitalismus)18 to
refer to the socio-economic conditions which they had
described earlier as late (spät) capitalist.19 Horkheimer
and Adorno never used the phrase ʻstate capitalismʼ in
their discussion of prevailing conditions in the West.
Moreover, economic factors – not the allegedly politi-
cal control of the economy by the state or by political
parties, as in Pollockʼs state capitalism thesis – occupy
the better part of their attention.
There are, however, two passages in Dialectic of
Enlightenment which might lend credence to the claim
that Adorno and Horkheimer adopted Pollockʼs thesis.
In their discussion of the culture industry, the authors
make passing reference to the emerging welfare state
in non-totalitarian countries, where ʻmen in top posts
maintain the economy in which the highly-developed
technology has in principle made the masses redundant
as producersʼ.20 This somewhat ambiguous passage
could be used to substantiate the interpretations cited
earlier. In a later remark in their notes and drafts on
the punitive techniques employed by ʻfascismʼ, Hork-
heimer and Adorno assert that the National Socialists
punish both the body and the ʻsoulʼ. In this, ʻfascismʼ
differs from what the authors (following Alexis de
Tocqueville) call ʻbourgeois republicsʼ, which gener-
ally punish the ʻsoulʼ alone. Horkheimer and Adorno
explain that under fascism, ʻThe concentration of
control over all production brings society back to the
stage of direct rule. When the market system is abol-
ished in a nation, intervening intellectual operations,
including law, also disappear.ʼ21 There is no ambiguity
in this passage. In contrast to bourgeois republics,
the National Socialists exercised direct physical and
psychological control over German citizens as they
took control of the means of production. Neumannʼs
arguments notwithstanding, the authors believe that
the power motive had superseded the profit motive in
Nazi Germany. It is, however, important to stress that
Horkheimer and Adorno distinguished ʻfascismʼ in this
regard from non-totalitarian states. If Nazi Germany
could be described as state capitalist in Pollockʼs sense
of this term, the authors refrained from describing
other Western states in this way.
In a 1942 essay, ʻReflexionen zur Klassentheorieʼ

Andy Fisher, Cleaning Machine # 1, 1998

(ʻObservations on the Theory of Classesʼ), Adorno
makes similar claims about the relationship between
the economy and the state in the West. Although
he does remark on the growing ʻliquidation of the
economyʼ22 in his ʻObservationsʼ, Adorno continues
to stress its primacy. He never explicitly agrees with
Pollock that state control over the economy is character-
istic of the newer phase of capitalism. Observing
the emergence of a new oligarchical ruling class in
many Western states, Adorno argues that this class
has disappeared ʻbehind the concentration of capitalʼ,
which has reached such a ʻsize and acquired such a
critical mass that capital appears as an institution,
as an expression of the entire societyʼ.23 Owing in
part to the concentration of capital, then, the ruling
class was becoming ʻanonymousʼ, making it much
more difficult to identify those in control. Here again,
Adorno describes the capitalist economy as ʻtotalitar-
ianʼ, and its totalitarian character is due largely to the
lack of competition under monopoly conditions.
However, it should also be noted that Adorno did
speak of ʻthe immediate economic and political com-
mand of the great [der Großen] that oppresses both
those who support it [the bourgeoisie] and the workers
with the same police threat, imposes on them the
same function and the same need, and thus makes it
virtually impossible for workers to see through the
class relation.ʼ24 In this passage, Adorno suggested that
power in mass societies is wielded by both economic
and political agents – though he did not explicitly
claim that the former had been subordinated to the
latter. In fact, in most passages in this essay, the
reverse seems to be the case: politics follows the lead
of economic developments (including changes in the
relations of production). Adornoʼs view that economic
factors continue to be primary in mass societies (or at
least as primary as political factors), is bolstered by
his claims about reification and the continued existence
of classes. If Adorno had actually adopted Pollockʼs
state capitalism thesis, he would have been obliged
to qualify carefully the idea he expresses throughout
his work that, under the guise of exchange value, the
market system has been extended to virtually all areas
of human life, promoting reification. And he certainly
would not have stated so baldly in a 1965 essay that
ʻ[p]rofit comes firstʼ in mass societies.25
In Behemoth, Neumann had observed that, ʻIf
one believes that Germanyʼs economy is no longer
capitalistic under National Socialism, it is easy to
believe further that her society has become classless.ʼ26
Paraphrasing Neumann, one could also state that if
Adorno had believed that non-totalitarian states were
no longer capitalist, it would have been easier for
him to deny the existence of classes. Yet Adorno did
insist on the continued existence of classes in these
states – as is clear from his remarks in ʻObservations
on the Theory of Classesʼ. Although the subjective
awareness of belonging to a class had diminished,
and the composition of classes in mass societies had
changed, ʻthe division of society into exploiters and
exploited not only continues to exist but gains in force
and strengthʼ.27 The bourgeoisie, which once consisted
of relatively independent entrepreneurs, lost much of
its economic power as the earlier liberal phase was
transformed by the concentration of capital (and the
resulting decrease in competition). This led to the

Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 19

formation of a new mass class comprising both the
middle class and the workers. On Adornoʼs account,
this change in the composition of classes under the
later phase of capitalism confirms Marxʼs prediction
about a society stratified into a ʻfew property owners
and the overwhelming mass of the propertylessʼ.28
These ideas about the continued existence of classes
are repeated throughout Adornoʼs work. In his 1965
essay, ʻSocietyʼ, for example, Adorno maintained that
ʻsociety remains class societyʼ,29 because ʻthe differ-
ence between the classes grows objectively with the
increasing concentration of capitalʼ.30 Three years later,
in ʻLate Capitalism or Industrial Society?ʼ, Adorno
clearly linked his analysis of classes to the idea that
the economic forces are primary. He claimed that if
one were to assume that mass societies are industrial
rather than capitalist in character, this might suggest
that mass societies had become ʻso thoroughly domin-
ated by unanticipated technological developments that
the notion of social relations … has by comparison
lost much of its relevance, if it has not become illu-
sory altogetherʼ.31 By contrast, if, as Adorno believed,
relations of production are paramount (and forces of
production are ʻmediated by the relations of prod-
uctionʼ) then the industrial society thesis is not true
in all respects because the capitalist system still pre-
dominates.32 Recognizing that it had become difficult
to apply Marxist criteria to existing conditions, Adorno
nonetheless asserted that, judging by the criterion
of ownership of the means of production, the class
relationship was most obvious in North America.33
However, Adorno did concede that there was
some truth to the claim that political control over
the economy is growing. The idea that ʻcontrol of
economic forces is increasingly becoming a function
of political power is true in the sense that it can be
deduced from the dynamics of the system as a wholeʼ.34
Expressed as a general tendency, then, state power is
gaining ground – and, by implication, Nazi Germany
becomes paradigmatic of trends that are more or less
latent in other Western nations. Yet Adorno strongly
limits this claim about political domination in non-
totalitarian countries when he adds that there are
also ʻcompelling facts which cannot in their turn
be adequately interpreted without invoking the key
concept of “capitalism”ʼ. As Adorno continued to
argue: ʻHuman beings are, as much as ever, ruled and
dominated by the economic process.ʼ Consequently,
ʻNow as much as ever, the societal process produces
and reproduces a class structure.ʼ35 The state capitalism
thesis is thus confirmed only in light of very general
(economic) trends or tendencies in mass societies.
20 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)
Although David Held is correct when he claims that
there is an ʻambivalenceʼ in Adornoʼs later work with
regard to Pollockʼs state capitalist thesis, this ambi-
valence is not confined to the later work.
Adornoʼs ʻambivalenceʼ appears again in his
response to Ralf Dahrendorfʼs criticisms of his ʻLate
Capitalismʼ essay. For Adorno, there could be little
disagreement that mass societies were tending towards
political domination. Adorno also explained that this
growing political control over the economy in the
West was itself the outgrowth of economic conditions.
If this economically driven trend towards political
domination continued, and ʻpolitical forms of contem-
porary society were radically compelled to follow
economic ones, contemporary society would, to put
it succinctly, steer directly towards forms that are
defined meta-economically – that is, towards forms
which are no longer defined by classical exchange
mechanismsʼ.36 Yet Adorno did not believe it was
inevitable that this tendency – and he emphasized
here that he was speaking explicitly of a tendency, as
opposed to a fully realized state of affairs – would be
realized fully in every state. Only if it were, would
a state capitalist reading of the ʻtotally administered
worldʼ be substantiated. Hence Scheuermanʼs remarks
about the administered worldʼs totalitarian political
character are not confirmed by Adornoʼs assessment
of prevailing conditions in the West.
At the end of his essay on late capitalism, Adorno
offers a number of equally brief but interesting remarks
about the factors responsible for state intervention in the
economy. He describes such intervention as ʻimmanent
to the systemʼ – a form of ʻself-defenceʼ.37 Since he
immediately preceded this remark with a discussion of
relations of production (or class relations) under late
capitalism, Adorno could be understood as implying
that state intervention (in the form of a mixed economy
or state planning) represents a defence against class
conflict. If this implication is correct, Adorno appears
to take up the view that state intervention was initiated
– at least in part – as a response to social conflicts
(real or potential). While this view is problematic
– and I shall explain why later in the article – it is a
fairly common one. For Adorno, state intervention in
the economy serves to counter the threat arising from
those ʻas yet unrevolutionized relations of productionʼ
whose power is ʻgreater than in the pastʼ.38
The logic of state intervention
Citing Hegelʼs Philosophy of Right, Adorno maintains
that the relationship between the state and the economy
is a dialectical one. For Hegel, the state is the dia-
lectical outcome of the interplay of laws and interests
in civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) where indi-
viduals satisfy their particular needs and interests by
way of exchange in the economic system (and through
other forms of association). Intervening in civil society
ʻfrom the outside with the help of the policeʼ, the state
ultimately ends by sublating the economy.39 Here the
ʻpoliceʼ – which, for Hegel, included public authorities
concerned with alleviating poverty – helps the state
to ʻactualize and maintain the universal contained
within the particularity of civil societyʼ by mediat-
ing between private relations (the family) and the

Andy Fisher, Cleaning Machine # 2, 1998

state. The control exercised by the police ʻtakes the
form of an external system and organization for the
protection and security of particular ends and interests
en masse, inasmuch as these interests subsist only in
this universalʼ.40 By means of the ʻpoliceʼ, then, the
universal interests of the state succeed in prevailing
over the particular interests of civil society, including
economic interests.
However, Adorno did not claim that this Hegelian
account of state intervention in the economy could be
used to describe existing conditions in non-totalitarian
mass societies. Correspondingly, he implicitly rejected
the application of Pollockʼs state capitalism thesis to
such conditions:
If it has long been argued on the basis of inter-
ventionism and, even more, of centralized planning,
that late capitalism is far removed from the anarchy
of commodity production and is therefore no longer
capitalism, one must respond that the social fate
of individuals is just as precarious as it was in the
past.
Pointing to critics who have shown that the liberal
market never worked in the way its liberal apologists
claimed – that it was never a truly ʻfreeʼ market
– Adorno thinks it ironic that this critique of liberalism
has been ʻrevived in the thesis that capitalism is not
really capitalisticʼ.41 In contrast to this thesis, Adorno
not only argues that the economic system has survived
owing in part to state intervention; he also claims that
such intervention has actually served to ensure the
continued primacy of the capitalist economy: ʻWhat
is extraneous to the [socio-economic] system reveals
itself as constitutive of the system, even the political
tendency itself. With interventionism, the resistive
power of the system is confirmed.ʼ42
At the same time, Adorno also reiterates the remarks
he had made earlier in the essay when he acknowl-
edged that state intervention tendentially confirms ʻthe
crisis theory of capitalismʼ. It does so because ʻthe
telos of state intervention is direct political domination
independent of market mechanismsʼ.43 Aided by the
police and the military, and abetted by public authori-
ties (such as state welfare agencies and institutions),
the state begins to assume greater economic func-
tions under a system of total administration. Yet this
growing trend towards political domination has never
been fully realized in most Western states. Continuing
with his interpretation of Hegel in his response to Ralf
Dahrendorf, Adorno writes that by ʻevoking powers
from out of itself – the so-called corporations and
policeʼ – civil society attempts to ʻfunction integrallyʼ
so as not to ʻfall to piecesʼ. Although Hegel saw this
ʻas something positive, in the mean time we have
learned most thoroughly from fascism … what the
renewed transition to direct domination can meanʼ.44
Hegelʼs account of the transition to political domina-
tion helped to explain changes transforming liberal
capitalism in one Western country: Nazi Germany.
This account – which sees the state backed in part by
the terrorist tactics of the police and military – thus
had a limited application, even though, once again, it
could also serve to explain totalitarian tendencies in
other Western nations.
In these other nations, the widening gap between
property owners and the propertyless was one of the
factors responsible for state intervention – in the form of
social security and the limited redistribution of wealth
(but also, one might add, in the form of bureaucratic,

Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 21

police and military control). Adorno thus implied that
state intervention was initiated in part in order to stave
off radical or revolutionary class conflicts. However,
the idea that the welfare state represents a political
response to real or potential class conflict is somewhat
problematic. On Christopher Loweʼs account of the
development of the ʻbig governmentʼ characteristic of
the welfare state, the latter did not originate primarily
in the ʻneed to solve social problemsʼ but rather ʻin the
need to establish the institutional conditions and forms
for the accumulation, re-investment and organizational
control of the capital gathered as markets were unfet-
teredʼ. In short: ʻCapitalism created big government in
order for government to help create the conditions for
expanded capital.ʼ45
The economic historian Herman Van der Wee
agrees with the main lines of Loweʼs assessment.
Before World War II, the state had been intervening
in the economy not to solve social problems, but
to ʻensure that profits and incomes were restored to
orderly levelsʼ.46 After World War II, John Maynard
Keynesʼs policy of ʻfull employment, social security,
income redistribution, and mutual co-operationʼ was
adopted in many Western countries as a means to
the end of economic growth. Although the form and
degree of state intervention never conformed entirely
to what Keynes had recommended, the policies of
this British economist did help to encourage earlier
trends. To varying degrees, postwar countries like
Britain, Sweden, the United States, France and Italy
ʻwent over to economic planning in order to be able to
specify extra-high growth rates and ensure they were
achievedʼ.47 Moreover, such intervention was supported
not only by left-wing political parties concerned with
social and economic inequalities; parties on the right
and centre themselves ʻdefended the principle of a
sizeable extension of government intervention into
economic life, and they gained considerable support
from industrialists, bankers, and intellectualsʼ.48
Van der Wee also observes that the tendency
towards state intervention in the economy appears
to be reversing itself. Keynesian theory assumed
ʻoptimally sized firmsʼ and ʻa competitive marketʼ.49
But, as mixed economies developed in the West, the
growth of multinationals (and the resulting decline
in competition under monopoly conditions) called
these assumptions into question. Recent economic
conditions are substantially different from the ones
Keynes originally described. After the 1974–75 eco-
nomic crisis, ʻthe enthusiasm for planning and central
consultation waned and most governments turned back
to the concepts of orthodox monetarismʼ.50 Explaining
22 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)
that there were other, deeper, causes for this retrench-
ment, Van der Wee cites growing world criticism as
one of these causes – including the Frankfurt School
among the critics of the welfare state. Adorno and his
colleagues acknowledged that the technical civilization
which was supposed to achieve Utopia in socialist
societies was in fact attained by the mixed economies
during their postwar development into welfare states.
Yet this technical welfare civilization had little or no
emancipatory potential and in fact tended to alien-
ate rather than satisfy. Moreover, it integrated the
working class totally into its value system, so that
the traditional social basis for revolution was lost.
Lastly it created an educated elite which, through the
co-operation between the bureaucratic state apparatus
and the technostructure of big business, was able to
establish and perpetuate its own power.51
Technology and Utopia
Van der Weeʼs assessment of Critical Theory can be
contested on a number of grounds. It is certainly not
the case that critical theorists believed ʻtechnicalʼ
civilization per se would achieve ʻutopiaʼ. Further-
more, the influence Van der Wee ascribes to their
critique is highly questionable – was this critique
really one of the deep ʻcausesʼ of the return to ortho-
dox monetarism? Van der Wee is certainly right to
point out that critical theorists had strong reservations
about the welfare state. However, he fails to note
that their criticism is dialectically inflected. This is
especially true of Adornoʼs work. In ʻLate Capitalism
or Industrial Societyʼ, for example, Adorno wrote: ʻIn
the highly industrialized parts of the world it has been
possible – at least, Keynes notwithstanding, as long as
new economic disasters do not occur – to prevent the
most blatant forms of poverty.ʼ Yet Adorno also added
that the highly bureaucratized Keynesian welfare state
had cast a ʻspellʼ over its citizens – a spell that ʻis
strengthened by greater social integrationʼ.52 Given
developments in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union,
Adorno was understandably critical of the tendency
towards state control over the economy. Such control
ʻnecessarily reinforces the totalitarian tendencies of
the social order, and is a political equivalent for and
adaptation to the total penetration of the market econ-
omyʼ.53 Moreover, as this control grows, individuals
become increasingly dependent on state institutions for
the satisfaction of their needs – especially when they
require protection against uncertain or crisis-ridden
economic tendencies. Writing about Nazi Germany,
Neumann had already explained that what accounted
for the general acquiescence of individuals to political
domination were pre-existing economic and politi-
cal factors: ʻNational Socialism did not create the
mass-men.… The transformation of men into mass-
men is the outcome of modern industrial capitalism
and of mass democracy.ʼ Monopoly capital and mass
democracy had ʻimprisoned man in a network of
semi-authoritarian organizations controlling his life
from birth to deathʼ, and transforming ʻculture into
propaganda and saleable commoditiesʼ.54
Similar economic and political conditions also
explained acquiescence to the welfare state in other
Western countries. If citizens view themselves as
passive clients of the welfare state which often robs

Andy Fisher, Cleaning Machine # 3, 1998

them of their autonomy and human dignity, Adorno
thought this reaction was ʻmarked to the last detail by
the conditions under which they liveʼ.55 For Adorno,
pre-existing economic conditions (in particular, the
growing monopolization and centralization of capital,
and the extension of the exchange principle to areas of
life that had formerly been immune or resistant to it)
were the primary factors shaping individual reactions
in non-totalitarian Western countries. In addition, the
bureaucratic organization of democratic states, which
had long preceded the creation of the welfare state,
also had a role to play in fostering attitudes and
responses to political domination and dependence on
the state. While a truly free society would not be able
to dispense with political and economic administra-
tion, in mass societies ʻadministrations have tended
under constraint towards a greater self-sufficiency and
independence from their administered subjects, reduc-
ing the latter to abstractly normed behaviorʼ.56
Once again, it was largely the potential threat of
totalitarianism that motivated Adornoʼs critique of the
welfare state. In the Soviet Union, ʻthe desire for more
rapid economic growth … brought about a dictatorial
and austere administrationʼ.57 And, of course, despite
the economic ʻsuccessesʼ of Hitlerʼs regime, its control
over the economy had been accompanied by growing
physical and psychological control over its citizens.
Serving as a largely unexamined end-in-itself, without
reference to the needs and interests of the population
at large, the goal of economic growth for its own
sake had been reached with equally irrational means:
totalitarian dictatorship. In less totalitarian socie-
ties, the tendency towards political domination also
pointed ʻin the direction of objective irrationalityʼ.58
The all-too-obvious defects in the market economy
have served to legitimate increasing state control not
only over the economy but also, by extension, over citi-
zens. Such control is unflinchingly reinforced by the
culture industry: ʻThe methods of centralized control
with which the masses are nevertheless kept in line,
require a degree of concentration and centralization
which possesses not only an economic, but also a
technological aspect, for instance – as the mass media
exemplify – the technical possibility of controlling
and coordinating [gleichschalten] the beliefs and atti-
tudes of countless people from some central location
– something which requires nothing more obtrusive
than the selection and presentation of news and news
commentary.ʼ59
Although he continued to support the Marxist view
that the economy is the primary ʻmotorʼ driving his-
torical developments, Adorno could nonetheless not
ignore the tendencies towards political domination in
non-totalitarian countries. His brief and often indirect
criticisms of state control over individuals often serve
to supplement his criticisms of the reifying effects
of capitalism. Conceding in ʻObservations on the
Theory of Classesʼ that the living standards of most
workers had improved under late capitalism, Adorno
also acknowledged that the ʻbloody dehumanizationʼ
of earlier forms of economic oppression and exploita-
tion had ʻfadedʼ. But if it is true that, with the end of
such dehumanization, the ʻfigure of the worker who
comes home drunk at night and beats up his family
has become extremely rareʼ, it is now also the case
that ʻhis wife has more to fear from the social worker

Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 23

who counsels her than she does from himʼ.60 The
administrative apparatus of the welfare state contrib-
utes to less overt – and for that reason, all the more
powerful – forms of dehumanization that take over
where economic exploitation leaves off.
The latest form of dehumanization is manifested
in economic and political powerlessness. Arguing
that poverty had been alleviated in the West ʻso that
the system would not be torn apartʼ, Adorno none-
theless insisted that the theory of impoverishment
had actually been confirmed by such powerlessness:
the proletariat and the bourgeoisie were now almost
completely dominated by the ʻsystemʼ.61 Individuals
in the new mass class had become ʻsimple objects of
administration in monopolies and their statesʼ.62 In
part a consequence of those socio-economic condi-
tions that had brought the welfare state into being,
the impotence of individuals with regard to the system
gives them little choice but to conform with prevailing
standards, stereotypes and modes of behaviour, and
to comply with the dictates of that ʻexpert opinionʼ
to which political administrations themselves defer.
In ʻCulture and Administrationʼ, Adorno wrote that,
rather than ʻmaking conscious decisionsʼ, individuals
tend to ʻsubjugateʼ themselves ʻto whatever has been
preordainedʼ. Spontaneity also declines ʻbecause total
planning takes precedence over the individual impulse,
predetermining this impulse in turn, reducing it to the
level of illusion, and no longer tolerating that play of
forces which was expected to give rise to a free total-
ityʼ.63 In another essay, ʻIndividuum und Organisationʼ,
Adorno targeted bureaucratic organization in general
(be it in the welfare state or industry). As it invades
private life either directly or indirectly, such organi-
zation ʻradically threatens people because it always
tolerates less freedom, immediacy and spontaneity and
tends to reduce those who are essential components
in society to simple atomsʼ.64 Adorno often used the
phrase ʻcogs in the wheelʼ to describe individuals in
the totally administered world.
The question of civil society
Despite these remarks about the damaging effects of
the welfare stateʼs administrative apparatus, Adornoʼs
critique of the welfare state is extremely sketchy; it
also involves generalizations that cannot always be
substantiated and that sometimes limit the force of
Adornoʼs arguments. It is to be hoped that the newer
left-wing critiques of the welfare state will be able
both to learn something from Adornoʼs analysis and to
surpass it. Like Pollock, Adorno also underestimated
the degree to which capitalist economic systems had
24 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)
always relied on the state: through laws which created
ʻcorporate, collective institutions of capital investment
and mobilizationʼ, as well as through ʻthe legal forms
of financial institutions and instruments, of market
mechanisms such as stock and commodity exchanges,
of laws and court decisions, limiting unionization by
workers, and of police and military forces to defend
the property of the wealthy and the emergent corpor-
ationsʼ.65 Moreover, notwithstanding his important
analysis of the new mass class in Western states,
Adorno failed to identify emerging areas of conflict
which are not entirely class-bound (even though such
conflicts are often far more bound to class than their
protagonists are prepared to admit).
Such areas of conflict are said to arise within ʻcivil
societyʼ. Apart from his brief reference to Hegelʼs
notion in ʻLate Capitalism or Industrial Society?ʼ,
Adorno did not give critical consideration to the non-
market and non-state organizations and associations
that also comprise civil society. Although civil society
ʻis always on the verge of extinctionʼ under totalitarian
dictatorships, it has not been extinguished completely in
Western states. As John Keane writes, ʻThe persistence
of (ailing) representative democratic mechanisms, the
concrete possibilities of legally establishing independ-
ent associations and movements, and the ongoing
tensions between capitalist and state bureaucracies
– among other factors – ensure that these systems do
not ʻconvergeʼ with their Soviet-type counterparts.ʼ66
However, even though he acknowledged that Western
states had not succumbed completely to totalitar-
ian tendencies, Adorno was very sceptical about the
potential for radical resistance to prevailing economic
and political conditions (and it is doubtful that Adorno
would have considered the demands of new social
movements to be ʻradicalʼ). He seemed to overlook the
democratic potential that some contemporary writers
claim to find in the civil societies of the West. In
fact, the culture industry often confirmed Adornoʼs
worst fears: social integration was being fostered at an
alarming rate, compromising the possibility of resist-
ance to the totalizing tendencies of the administered
world.
Once again, for Adorno, it was the dominance of
the exchange principle – and not of the political system
– that was largely responsible for undermining the
potential for resistance in the West. In arguing against
Adornoʼs views, then, it is not sufficient to point to the
existence of formally democratic political institutions,
or to the possibilities of legally instituting non-market
and non-state organizations and associations. Since
Adorno believed that individuals in the West had
fallen under the spell of the exchange principle, what Notes
needs to be shown is either that Adorno was simply All translations from texts for which the German edition is
wrong about the primacy of economic factors and their cited are by the author.
effects on individuals, or that the economically engen- 1. Friedrich Pollock, ʻState Capitalism: Its Possibilities and
dered ʻspellʼ is much more limited in its effects than Limitationsʼ, Studies in Philosophy and Social Research,
vol. IX, no. 2, 1941, p. 207.
Adorno claimed. While Adorno concurs with Keane
2. Ibid., p. 200.
that political systems in the West are not entirely 3. Ibid., p. 223.
totalitarian in character, Keaneʼs view of the welfare 4. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice
state as ʻundermining the commodity formʼ, thereby of National Socialism, 1933–1944, Octagon Books, New
York, 1963, p. 222.
weakening its ʻgrip on civil societyʼ,67 is questionable 5. Ibid., p. 260.
when it is recognized that the lionʼs share of the lives 6. Ibid., p. 261.
of citizens in the West is exhausted in activities of 7. See ibid., p. 293.
production and consumption which serve the economic 8. See ibid., p. 354.
9. Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the
system either directly or indirectly. Keane also fails Development of Critical Theory, trans. Benjamin Gregg,
to recognize that the welfare state itself primarily MIT Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1985, p. 81.
serves economic functions that are largely consonant 10. David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer
to Habermas, University of California Press, Berkeley
with the interests of the owners of the means of
and Los Angeles, 1980, p. 63.
production. And, unlike Jürgen Habermas, who now 11. Ibid., p. 64.
generally rejects Adornoʼs views about the primacy 12. William E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Ex-
of the economy, Keane does not take into account the ception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law, MIT
Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1994, p. 124.
fact that the equality of citizens formally guaranteed 13. Douglas Kellner, Critical Theory, Marxism and Moder-
by the welfare state has been achieved ʻonly at the nity, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore
price of autonomyʼ.68 MD, 1989, pp. 62–3.
Haunted by the memory of Nazi Germany, and 14. Ibid., p. 78
15. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of
wary of the totalitarian tendencies visible in other Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, Continuum, New
countries in the West, Adorno was understandably York, 1972, p. xiv.
less convinced than many contemporary writers that 16. Ibid., p. 37.
17. Ibid., p. 38.
Western states would continue to leave spaces open
18. Ibid., p. 55.
for dissent and radically transformative action. More- 19. Ibid., p. 54.
over, the tendencies towards political domination that 20. Ibid., p. 150.
Adorno observed might well impede (or, at the very 21. Ibid., p. 228.
22. Theodor W. Adorno, ʻReflexionen zur Klassentheorieʼ,
least, arrest) the development of both formal democ- in Soziologische Schriften I, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt
racy and more participatory forms of government am Main, 1972, p. 385.
concerned with satisfying the needs and interests of 23. Ibid., p. 380.
all individuals. In his private remarks to Horkheimer 24. Ibid.
25. Theodor W. Adorno, ʻSocietyʼ, trans. Fredric Jameson,
about Pollockʼs state capitalism thesis, Adorno wrote Salmagundi, vol. 3, nos. 10–11, 1969–70, p. 148.
that, in contrast to Kafka, who ʻrepresented the 26. Neumann, Behemoth, p. 365.
bureaucratic hierarchy as hellʼ, Pollock himself had 27. Adorno, ʻReflexionen zur Klassentheorieʼ, p. 377.
28. Ibid., p. 380.
succeeded in transforming hell ʻinto a bureaucratic
29. Adorno, ʻSocietyʼ, p. 149 (translation altered).
hierarchyʼ.69 Although Adornoʼs scattered criticisms 30. Ibid., p. 150.
of the welfare state occasionally appear to corroborate 31. Theodor W. Adorno, ʻLate Capitalism or Industrial Soci-
a more nuanced version of Pollockʼs hell-become- ety?ʼ, in V. Meja, D. Misgeld and N. Stehr, eds, Modern
German Sociology, Columbia University Press, New
hierarchy thesis – inasmuch as tendencies towards York, 1987, p. 232.
political domination can be found in non-totalitarian 32. Ibid., p. 242.
states – far more important in Adornoʼs work were 33. Ibid., p. 236.
the underlying economic conditions responsible for 34. Ibid., p. 237.
35. Ibid.
the creation of the welfare state. For Adorno, the 36. Theodor W. Adorno, ʻDiskussionsbeitrag zu “Spätkapital-
Charybdis of welfare state administration and control ismus oder Industriegesellschaft?”ʼ, in Soziologische
was unquestionably overshadowed by the Scylla of Schriften I, p. 583.
37. Adorno, ʻLate Capitalismʼ, p. 244 (translation altered).
reification and ʻmassificationʼ under late capitalism.
38. Ibid., p. 243.
To circumvent the political whirlpool, one must first 39. Ibid., p. 244 (translation altered). When Adorno speaks
bypass the economic monster. of the state as intervening in the economy ʻfrom the

Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 25

 outsideʼ, he adds that such intervention is also ʻa part of 56. Adorno, ʻSocietyʼ, p. 151.
societyʼs immanent dialecticsʼ. By way of explaining the 57. Adorno, ʻLate Capitalismʼ, p. 243.
apparent paradox, Adorno refers to Marx, for whom the 58. Ibid., p. 237.
revolution of relations of production was at one and the 59. Ibid., p. 243.
same time ʻcompelled by the course of historyʼ and ʻef- 60. Adorno, ʻReflexionen zur Klassentheorieʼ, p. 389.
fective only through an action qualitatively differentiated 61. Ibid., p. 385.
from the unity of the systemʼ (ibid., p. 244; translation 62. Ibid., p. 386.
altered). 63. Theodor W. Adorno, ʻCulture and Administrationʼ, trans.
40. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox, Wes Blomster, Telos 37, 1978, p. 105.
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1976, p. 152. 64. Adorno, ʻIndividuum und Organisationʼ, pp. 443–4.
41. Adorno, ʻLate Capitalismʼ, p. 244 (translation altered). 65. Lowe, in his unpublished response to Belkinʼs ʻThe Left
42. Ibid., pp. 244–5 (translation altered). and Limited Governmentʼ.
43. Ibid., p. 245. 66. John Keane, ʻIntroductionʼ, in Civil Society and the
44. ʻDiskussionsbeitragʼ, p. 584. State: New European Perspectives, ed. John Keane,
45. Christopher Lowe, in an unpublished response to David Verso, London and New York, London and New York,
Belkinʼs ʻThe Left and Limited Governmentʼ, Socialist 1988, p. 5.
Forum, June 1996.
67. Ibid., p. 7.
46. Herman Van der Wee, Prosperity and Upheaval: The
68. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Con-
World Economy, 1945–1980, trans. Robin Hogg and Max
tributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy,
R. Hall, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los
trans. William Rehg, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1996,
Angeles, 1986, p. 283.
p. 418.
47. Ibid., p. 35.
69. Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,
48. Ibid. p. 287.
49. Ibid., p. 315. Theories and Political Significance, trans. Michael Rob-
50. Ibid., p. 320. ertson, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1994, p. 282.
51. Ibid., p. 334.
52. Adorno, ʻLate Capitalismʼ, p. 239.
53. Adorno, ʻSocietyʼ, p. 151.
54. Neumann, Behemoth, p. 367.
55. Theodor W. Adorno, ʻIndividuum und Organisationʼ, in
Soziologische Schriften I, pp. 451–2.

Day conference

POST-CONVENTIONAL
RELIGION:
FEMINISM, ETHICS AND
SPIRITUALITY
Philippa Berry, Daphne Hampson,
Luce Irigaray, Danah Zohar

Saturday 23 May 1998

10.00 - 17.30

ICA
12 Carlton House Terrace,
The Mall, London

Tickets £20 (concessions £15)

from box office 0171 930 3647
after 20 April

26 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)

Philosophy in Germany
Simon Critchley and Axel Honneth

SC: Simply as a way of initially organizing our discussion, we both agreed to read a short
article by Dieter Henrich that appeared in Merkur in his philosophy column, ʻEine Generation
im Abgangʼ (ʻA Passing Generationʼ).1 Henrich rightly claims that a change of generations
is coming to an end in German philosophy, which is most clearly marked by the retirement
of Jürgen Habermas in 1994 and the death of Hans Blumenberg in 1996. But we might also
speak of a wider generational change that would include Karl-Otto Apel, Ernst Tugendhat,
Michael Theunissen and Niklas Luhmann, as well as figures like Otto Poeggeler and Robert
Spaemann. Almost all of this generation are now retired, and it is at the moment unclear who
and what will take their place.
As Henrich explains, the oldest and the youngest of this generation are only separated by
about fifteen years, and most of then came out of three philosophical schools – Bonn, Münster
and Heidelberg. Gadamerʼs name, and his brand of urbane Heideggerianism, should also be
mentioned in this postwar conjuncture, although he precedes the generation we are talking
about. Before moving on to the question of how the contemporary philosophical scene looks
in Germany, we might perhaps begin with Henrichʼs description of what the ʻpassing genera-
tionʼ had in common. First and foremost, despite their obvious philosophical and ideological
differences, what they shared was a common context: the overwhelming presence of the trauma
and catastrophe of National Socialism. Thinking of Habermas, if one reads a fascinating
early piece from 1961 on ʻDer deutsche Idealismus der jüdischen Philosophenʼ (ʻThe German
Idealism of Jewish Philosophersʼ), it reveals the postwar philosophical ambition to reconcile
Jews and Germans.2 But Henrich puts the issue in the following terms:

With these considerations in mind one has really understood what the first task of young
philosophers in postwar Germany had to be: essentially they worked in order to maintain
or restore the worldwide credibility of thinking in the German language. Alongside music,
philosophy was for a long time the most significant cultural export good of Germany. Since
Kant, German philosophy has distinguished itself through a basic style of investigation that
always ended in a synthesis in answer to questions of principle, limit and life. 3

To this demand for synthesis, we might also add the requirement of universalism and the
method of rational argumentation. So it would seem that it is through a rationally achieved
synthesis with a universalist scope that German philosophy responds to the catastrophe of
National Socialism; and this is combined with an overwhelming fear of relativism and irra-
tionalism, which always seems to go together with the fear of reducing the wissenschaftlich
(ʻscientificʼ) character of philosophy, or the reduction of philosophy to what Henrich calls
ʻLiterarisierungʼ (ʻmaking literaryʼ). In your view, is this a fair characterization of German
philosophy in the postwar period?

AH: Yes, I think it is to a certain degree, but maybe it is not broad or differentiated enough.
As is indicated by the Habermas article you mentioned, there was not only the search for the
restoration of a certain kind of credibility; there was also from the beginning among some
of that postwar generation the ambition to address and clarify the moral disaster of National
Socialism. There was therefore not only the attempt to regain the great German tradition
in the sense of the Kantian heritage but also to regain or overcome the separation from the
Jewish tradition, which was highly specific and extremely important for the whole of German

Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 27

philosophy at the beginning of the century. This was not only an enterprise of Habermas, but
others too, who attempted to reconstruct the specifically Jewish element in German philosophy.
If you take the example of someone like Michael Theunissen, he spent a lot of energy in his
first major work – the book on the Other – reconstructing the work of Martin Buber, and that
was intentional.4 It was meant to overcome the separation between the Jewish tradition and
the German situation after the Second World War. This is something totally excluded from
the picture given by Henrich.
The other thing that he underestimates is, let us say, the moral dimension of the early
period of German philosophy after the Second World War, after the disaster or catastrophe.
This is something best described by Karl-Otto Apel in a famous article which I strongly
recommend.5 There Apel describes his own enterprise – namely, the search for a universal
ground for moral principles of respect and autonomy – as a response to, and a clarification
of, the moral dimension of the disaster. So there was also the moral dimension in that whole
postwar period, and this is also not clearly enough indicated by Henrich. That is very closely
connected with people in Bonn. I mean, if you take the three universities mentioned by Henrich,
then one should be careful to differentiate between these places. For example, it is interesting
that in Münster from very early on – the middle of the 1950s I think – there were several
people trying to come into contact with Carl Schmitt. It is hard to explain why suddenly, in
a group of younger people, there was this interest in the work of Schmitt when they were all
aware that he had been deeply involved in the fascist juridical administration. These people
were no longer connected to the fascist world; they were trying to be liberals, democratic
liberals. I think one can explain this interest in Schmitt because he was the only one who
participated in fascism who never publicly regretted having done so. This made Schmitt quite
singular because all the others – Gehlen and even Heidegger – were either silenced by their
involvement, or very quickly became converts to the new regime. So, to complicate Henrichʼs
picture, this interest in Schmitt at Münster, which came out of the circle of Joachim Ritter,
led to a very fruitful, although not unproblematic, relation to the prewar past. All I want to
say is that Henrichʼs picture is not differentiated enough. I think it is rather simplistic to say
that the main ambition of postwar German philosophy was to regain credibility; there were
so many other motives, moral motives. There was also the motive of finding oneʼs place in a
culture increasingly influenced by the United States. One should not forget the continuation
of the Heideggerian tradition to an incredible degree in the postwar period. In Bonn, where
Habermas and Apel were students, the influence of Heidegger was striking. Habermas and
Apel started as what we might call left Heideggerians. If one adds these additional elements
to Henrichʼs picture, then I think it is basically correct.

SC: OK. But what about the desire for synthesis that Henrich talks about. Does this define
the postwar period of German philosophy?

AH: Yes. I think what was still very important, and almost seen as self-evident in that period,
is that any philosophical enterprise requires synthetic power. I wouldnʼt reduce that requirement
uniquely to Kantʼs philosophy, as it is a very traditional idea of German philosophy that you
have to construct your own system. You have to find your own theory, your own philosophical
position. This was a requirement not explicitly formulated but deeply internalized. So it was
true that almost all the main figures in the generation we are speaking of had the strong
belief that they had to formulate their own systematic philosophical position during the next
ten or twenty years. This was indeed as it has been in the prewar period, where you had
Husserl or Nikolai Hartmann or Heidegger; where you not only had philosophical teachers
and professional philosophers, but strong philosophical positions connected to specific persons.
Each one stood for a whole programme, and you could describe the philosophical landscape
with reference to persons who represented clearly demarcated positions, discrete forms of
synthesis. It was clearly understood that in order to find your own synthetic position, your

28 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)

own new and original position, you had to rework the philosophical tradition. Originality was
the requirement both before and after the war.

The present generation

SC: Let us now turn to the present situation. At the end of Henrichʼs article, he makes the
following observation. First: that the generation that is now coming to an end achieved a
remarkable international notoriety, and worldwide recognition. This is most obviously the
case with Habermas, but also with Henrich himself and Apel and others. But what of the
present generation?
Henrich is extremely critical of the generation that followed his own – your generation
– and indeed alludes to a kind of analytic–continental split in German philosophy, between
what he sees, rightly or wrongly, as a kind of Derridean playfulness and endless paraphrase
on the one side, and an early Putnamian analytic narrowness on the other – what Henrich
sees as a bad professionalism. Henrich goes so far as to say that the ʼ68 generation brought
up under Adenauer are ʻturnshoesʼ, and is rather pessimistic as to whether philosophy can
avoid the double threat of Literarisierung on the one hand and narrow professionalism on
the other. He writes:

If one takes note of the connections I have tried to develop, then it is self-evidently neces-
sary to ask the question as to whether the generation of German philosophers who are now
taking up their places will be able to bring about a beginning with long-term effect, or
whether they can simply be understood as a distant reverberation of the Weimar Republic
in the radically changed conditions of the postwar period. An effective break in motiva-
tional history [Motivationsgeschichte] would then first enter onto the scene with those who
were born after the war, in Adenauerʼs Federal Republic. It might be able to explain why
the surprising success of postwar German philosophy in the wider world finds no continua-
tion for the time being.

Is Henrich right? Is your generation so bad? Is this description at all justified?

AH: That is also a very complicated question. To start with the last sentence, the fact that the
younger generation of philosophers – the middle generation letʼs say – born in the 1940s and
early 1950s has not gained such an international reputation or recognition is also due to the
fact that it was only after the 1970s that the Anglo-Saxon colonization of the philosophical
world began. This situation was something that the earlier generation was not really confronted
with. In that time, I would say, there was a kind of multicultural situation in philosophy, albeit
a multiculturalism restricted to the Western world. What I mean is that there were strong
influences from France on the philosophical agenda in the 1950s and 1960s. Sartre had an
incredible influence; French existentialism was one of the main positions at that time. And
Merleau-Ponty was famous and widely read. Thus, it was not a situation in which there was
a clear hegemony of one tradition: Anglo-Saxon philosophy. So it was maybe a little easier
at that time, and the chances of gaining international respect were higher, as well as having
cross-national contacts, influences, etc. So that is the first remark I would like to make: that
today, under these new conditions where it is obviously the fact (and I donʼt want to judge
this fact) that the analytic tradition is hegemonic, it is much more complicated for people
from other countries easily to gain that kind of international respect.
The other remark would be directly concerned with Henrichʼs description. I think to a
certain degree he is right, but maybe it is more complicated to explain why that is the case.
I think it is right to say that there is a new tendency to a kind of bad professionalism in
German philosophy. If you look at what normally happens in the big meetings of the German
Philosophical Association, it is extremely boring, and to a certain degree that is because
of professionalism. I donʼt even see that there are many tendencies towards what he calls
Derridean playfulness. I donʼt really see that in philosophy. Maybe it has a bigger role in
other disciplines or in other areas, but not in philosophy. But what Henrich is underestimat-
ing, I think, and characteristically underestimating, is that in the 1960s when this generation

Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 29

received their main influences in philosophy as students there was a new motivation emerging,
of which he is not really aware. It is perhaps not surprising that he is not aware of it because,
as far as I know, Henrich reacted negatively to what took place in the ʼ68 student movement
– namely, that new questions came up which together formed a horizon of motives for younger
philosophers. Clearly, the main motive was for the first time a really sharp awareness of the
fact that oneʼs own parents – fathers, sometimes mothers – had collaborated in fascism. This
was the experience of that generation, I think, and you can still see it in some of the small
philosophical enterprises where it functions as a kind of background motivation. I must say
that the other strong motive is something beyond Henrichʼs horizon – the whole question of
what Habermas is now calling, in the title of his latest book, Die Einbeziehung des Anderen
(The Inclusion of the Other).6 This is the fact that others are not only playing the role of
citizens, but are there in very different roles; that the other has many faces; that it is more of
a task to acknowledge or recognize these other spheres of the other. The whole problem of
the other is something that was new for that generation. Maybe the title of Theunissenʼs book
already indicated that task, but it became a very strong force behind a lot of the writings of
the 1960sʼ generation, as a background cultural motivation.
The other background motivation I would mention is the problem of freedom, which is
obviously the main issue of the ʼ68 movement. We might speak here of the ambivalences of
liberalization. What I mean is the fact that freedom is something more radical than seen in
earlier times; that freedom is also about cultural roles, sexual roles, gender roles, which is
something that this generation created and explored. And I think this also goes some way to
explaining why, at the beginning of the 1970s and 1980s, there were still some philosophical
figures of my generation who tried to create original work of a synthetic character, who were
either ignored by the system, or who became more or less integrated into it, but continued along
the same route. To mention one name: Andreas Wildt, who never got a university position,
who came originally from Dieter Henrich, and then was an assistant of Michael Theunissen.
He wrote a very interesting book on Hegel and Fichte in this synthetic tradition, which is an
extremely powerful reinterpretation of the practical philosophy of Hegel and Fichte with the
aim of creating a kind of moral philosophy aware of the non-legal relation to others.7 This is
only an example. It is meant to indicate that Henrich is right in his description of the present
generation, but that he is ignoring some stronger energies in that generation which either had
the chance to survive the last fifteen years – fifteen years of high professionalization and a
boring development in German philosophy – or were repressed by the philosophical system
and the philosophical establishment. He is simply overlooking the fact that the philosophical
establishment ignored some of the creativity of the ʼ68 movement.

SC: Is there a philosophical establishment in Germany? If so, how would you characterize
it?

AH: Yes, there definitely is and it is typical that people like Habermas, Apel, Theunissen
and Tugendhat never belonged to that establishment. There is an establishment, the members
of which are not even very well known in the outside world, who are mainly professionals
doing their ordinary jobs, writing more or less interesting or boring books, but who had
something like the power of academic philosophy in their grasp. And they are to a certain
degree responsible for the fact that more creative persons never had a chance. Take Peter
Sloterdijk, who at the outset was quite an interesting philosopher, who very early on wrote
an extremely interesting article on Foucault, and then published his book on the Critique of
Cynical Reason.8 Maybe if he had had a chance in the philosophical system, he wouldnʼt have
gone in the direction he is now going – namely, a kind of wild journalism.

SC: You have already begun to answer my next question, which concerns the Motivations-
geschichte of contemporary German philosophy. If the motivation of the postwar generation
was found in a response to the moral disaster of National Socialism, then the question that
Henrich raises concerns the motivation for your own generation. You have answered this

30 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)

 question in terms of the problem of freedom, the questioning of established orders, and,
tangentially perhaps, the whole issue of power. Let us push the logic of Henrichʼs position
a little further. What Henrich seems prepared to admit – which is an extremely interesting
and un-English thought – is that there has to be some sort of almost traumatic motivation to
philosophizing; that philosophy comes out of, and tries to make good on, a traumatic situa-
tion. If one were looking for a recent historical event in Germany that might provide such a
motivation to philosophizing, then one would obviously think of ʼ89: the Wende. Now maybe
it is just too soon to tell what is going to happen, if anything, and whether the changes in
Germany will have intellectual consequences. Of course, one persuasive diagnosis of what
happened in the philosophical profession after ʼ89 is a complete philosophical takeover of the
East by the West, which is obviously to do with the peculiar character that philosophy had
in the ideological superstructure of the former DDR – that is, its strongly Marxist-Leninist
orientation. Do you think that what took place was simply a takeover? And do you think
anything will come out of the reunification of Germany as a historical event in terms of a
possible motivation for philosophy?

AH: Yes, without hesitation I would even use the word colonization to describe what took
place in the former DDR. I think it was a takeover. It has to do with the fact that there is
a philosophical establishment in the West which was not sensitive enough in the period of
reunification towards creative potentialities in the DDR. I mean that there were people who
were intellectuals, creative, quite original, but not established. They were forced to write in
another kind of language, not that of Western professionalism. I think it would have been
better not simply to introduce our professional standards into that new situation, but to open
the standards to other forms of talent and other potentialities; or at least try to integrate
those people into the new university and economic system. But that was never really tried.
In that sense it was a colonization process on both the administrative and intellectual level.
Philosophy in the DDR was simply assimilated. I canʼt really say whether the experience of
ʼ89 is a kind of motivational force which could lead to a new kind of philosophical original-
ity. At the present time, I donʼt see anything like that happening. Maybe there are some new
Jörg Immendorff, Café Deutschland 1, 1978

Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 31

discussions, once again, about how to respect the other, if you understand the former DDR
as the other of our own society. And there are some quite interesting debates which try to
apply the multiculturalism controversy to exactly that situation. But I donʼt see that it is really
a kind of new horizon which has been opened up by that experience. It has to do with the
fact that nobody experienced reunification as a kind of traumatization. It wasnʼt a traumatic
experience. Maybe it will become a traumatic experience for those from the East who had no
chance to survive as philosophers or as intellectuals after reunification.
And let me say something else about this whole idea of Motivationsgeschichte: I think it
is very interesting to use that kind of concept. I think it is quite different from the self-under-
standing of philosophy in the analytical world and runs against all forms of professionalism.
Henrich seems to be convinced that there must be extra motivation behind serious philosophy.
I think thatʼs true. At least it is true for the German tradition, where traumatic, or letʼs just
say deep, experiences provide the motivation for the creative synthesis of which he speaks.
The clearest case is German Idealism and Romanticism. It is clear that the experience of the
French Revolution in Germany was the kind of experience that Henrich has in mind. And
the same is true for the First World War, which was a traumatic experience for philosophers
like Heidegger. So the question again is whether the fact that there was not something like a
deep negative experience in the background and education of my own generation leads to a
kind of philosophical emptiness. Although, as I have already said, I think that my generation
had its own background motivations which were not negligible.

SC: Of course, the curious thing about trauma is that traumatic neurosis often has a delayed
effect, it is always nachträglich. If you look at the last fifty years of German history, there
was the trauma of the postwar generation, the generation born before the war, that studied
in the postwar years and then, in Henrichʼs words, tried to restore the credibility of German
philosophy. But what is interesting about postwar German history is that the trauma took
a generation to begin to be worked through, so that it is the ʼ68 generation that in a sense
feels the trauma and is visited by the sins of the fathers, where the Holocaust only becomes
a significant national issue from the 1960s and a dominating issue in the 1970s. So, in a
sense, whether the Wende will become traumatic for the following generation is still an open
question. But let us go on to our second topic.

German philosophy, Anglo-American hegemony and

Franco-German (mis)understanding
SC: For me, it has been an odd but interesting experience being in Frankfurt over the past
year. Although I have felt increasingly compelled in recent years by the first generation of
the Frankfurt School, a lot of my work, as you know, has been concerned with contemporary
French philosophy – in particular, the work of Derrida and Levinas, but more generally with
post-Heideggerian phenomenology. This brings me to the question or the relation of phil-
osophy in Germany to other traditions – in particular, the strongly contrasting relation to the
Anglo-American and French contexts, where the complete acceptance of the former seems
to be predicated upon steadfast refusal of the latter.
I think it would be genuinely surprising to many people concerned with philosophy in the
English-speaking world how utterly much contemporary German philosophy is dominated
by the Anglo-American agenda. In metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of mind and
language, it is difficult to see any substantial difference between what passes for philosophy
in Germany and what a student might expect to find in a mainstream syllabus in Britain.
The currency of philosophical exchange is the names of Davidson, Quine, Putnam, Bernard
Williams, etc., and there is a considerable interest in post-analytic philosophers like Taylor
and Rorty. And many of the younger German students I have met have little knowledge of
the German tradition, with the exception of Kant and elements of German idealism. During
my time at Frankfurt, no courses were offered on phenomenology, whether Husserlian or
Heideggerian; not to mention the absence of Dilthey, the hermeneutic tradition, and obviously
the complete absence of French philosophy, with the complex exception of Foucault. For me,

32 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)

this was both surprising and slightly saddening. Thus, for the visitor from the English-speaking
world, philosophy in Germany is characterized by a certain shock of the familiar. On the other
hand, two things are on offer in Germany that a student could not expect to find in Britain:
the philological tradition of textual study; and also, more importantly, the tradition of social
philosophy, which is more or less absent in the UK. We might like to discuss this later.
However, this is not my point, for what is interesting is that there is a complete openness
to everything that comes out of the English-speaking world, and to what Henrich calls an
Englischen gewonnene Argumentationskultur (a culture of argumentation won from the
English); whilst there is a complete blindness and antagonism to the French philosophical
scene. Again, Henrich is revealing in this regard, for he makes the contrast between the need
for ʻsolid argumentationʼ and ʻevidenceʼ, and the French tendency, which he characterizes in
terms of the identification of philosophy with literature and the domination of the masters
of suspicion – Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.9 Of course, one can find many similar statements
in Habermas, even in his most recent texts.10 Such statements are symptomatic, I believe. Do
you think that the openness to Anglo-American philosophy has been achieved at the expense
of a relative blindness to the French tradition? And how do you see this geo-philosophical
picture? What does the French tradition represent for the postwar generation of German
philosophers? To my mind, it seems to play the role of a memory of a German tradition no
longer acceptable in Germany, a tradition allegedly compromised by fascism. In this sense,
French philosophy is a sort of ʻreturn of the repressedʼ for German philosophy. How do you
see this complex set of issues?

AH: Let me start with the last point. I do not think it is totally fair to describe the role of
post-structuralism or deconstructivism as being only a kind of repressed memory of the
German tradition. That is simply not true, because it underestimates the strong impact that
Heidegger still has on German philosophy. I think that what you say may be true for Frankfurt,
and especially true for Habermas. But it is not a fair picture of the philosophical situation in
Germany. You shouldnʼt forget that not only in Freiburg but in many places – Heidelberg and
Tübingen, maybe in Munich or Berlin – the role of Heidegger is still quite dominant and is
even growing today. One philosophical consequence of the situation after ʼ89 was a kind of
broad rehabilitation of Heidegger. So in many ways matters are the reverse of the way you
claim. The fact that Habermas is still criticizing a certain Heideggerianism is a result of the
growing influence of Heidegger in Germany. The whole vast enterprise of the publication of
Heideggerʼs Gesamtausgabe is an indication, an objective indication, of that fact.
I think the more significant fact today is the ever-growing influence of Anglo-Saxon phil-
osophy in Germany. To explain that, I think it is necessary to remember that when we started
studying philosophy (and now I am talking about members of my own generation), the German
university was in most places, with very few exceptions – Frankfurt being one, Heidelberg and
Berlin others – utterly dominated by the philological tradition. My own experience, when I
started studying philosophy in Bonn, was that this was an extremely boring kind of philosophy:
thousands of lines interpreting Kant again, or Hegel, or maybe Aristotle, or the whole grand
tradition in a kind of endless repetition. This is a style of philosophy which is still quite present
today and sometimes not really seen from outside because it is so boring. Factually speaking,
I am sure that we have more literature on Hegel than any other philosophical culture in the
world. But our literature on Hegel is, I would say, simply more boring than that produced in
the United States today. We have a strong tradition of philological expertise and excellence,
a style which finds its highest expression in Gadamer, because he is brilliant at producing
philosophical arguments by reinterpreting classical texts. But normally what is going on is
a kind of philological exegesis which leads, I would say, to no significant systematic results.
So that is the background you have to be aware of in order to understand why a lot of
members of my own generation, and especially parts of the younger generation, are very
attracted by the Anglo-Saxon style of argumentation. It at least produces a kind of philosophical
atmosphere in which arguments count; in which you have to produce arguments; and in which

Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 33

you can have fruitful discussions about where arguments lead. In a philological culture, there
are no debates like that at all.

SC: So, you are saying that analytic philosophy in a German context has had an emancipa-
tory effect.

AH: Yes, exactly. It emancipated us from extremely boring teachers, and is still emancipating
us from them. Even if you look at our own department in Frankfurt, you can see how fruitful
it can be to learn a little bit of the Anglo-Saxon tradition in order to get rid of these boring
people who are repeating one sentence after the other without making any point. The conse-
quence of this, and I think that you are right, is a certain and still growing underestimation of
the French tradition, which I would not reduce (as Henrich does) to a kind of playfulness or
reduction of philosophy to literature. This is simply an unfair description of what has happened
in French philosophy in the last fifty years. It is an underestimation of the phenomenological
tradition, which is still extremely lively, powerful and fruitful in France. I think it is true that
this type of French philosophy is getting lost today in Germany.
The fact that there has been no fruitful dialogue with French philosophy during the last
twenty years is more difficult to explain. I think to a certain degree it is a result of a very
unfruitful period in German philosophy during the last ten or fifteen years, where Habermas
produced a picture of French philosophy as being nothing other than a kind of playful literature.
This seems to have had the consequence that in the end nobody really took it seriously, and
Henrich is simply repeating what Habermas is saying. I simply think Henrich is no longer
aware of what is going on in France. So I reckon that Habermasʼs intervention has had a very
damaging effect and placed the Franco-German relation under the heading: irrationality versus
rationality. I think this is a fruitless dualism. It means that we are now in a situation in which
this kind of dialogue has been interrupted. Of course, there are exceptions; and it is interesting
to see that in some analytical areas of German philosophy an interest in Sartre is growing
again – for example, in the work of Peter Bieri. That is, Sartre is being understood and taken
seriously as a philosopher of subjectivity. With respect to Henrich, this is interesting because
it is his disciples, like Manfred Frank, who are taking Sartre seriously.

SC: Sartre is also an exception in Britain, where he is the so-called continental philosopher
who has most often been taught on philosophy syllabuses, and whose concerns seem to have
been closest to analytic philosophy. This has often struck me as a curious state of affairs
which is premissed on simply not reading Sartreʼs later work.
But I would like to pick up again on the question of social philosophy in a slightly rounda-
bout way. Listening to what you said about the emancipatory function of analytic philosophy
in Germany, I think we find ourselves in an oddly paradoxical cultural situation. For your
generation of philosophers educated in Germany, the fact that the reading of analytic phil-
osophy had an emancipatory effect contrasts strongly with the experience of that generation of
British philosophers (like me) who rather awkwardly call themselves ʻcontinentalʼ or ʻmodern
Europeanʼ, or whatever. In Britain, for good or ill, theories were imported from France and
Germany in order to confront the perceived cultural irrelevance and apolitical neutrality or
conservatism of the analytic tradition. So we find in Britain and Germany precisely opposing
philosophical resources being employed for the same emancipatory goal, which is an odd situ-
ation. Perhaps the philosophical grass is always greener on the other side of the cultural fence.
But what I would like to emphasize here, which is not properly understood in Germany, is that
the interest in continental philosophy often goes together, with certain striking exceptions, with
a broadly leftist concern for the social, cultural and political function of the philosopher. This is
supported by the British cultural fantasy of the continental intellectual as that person who can
address their culture, who speaks out of a public culture, and who speaks to a public culture,
who is socially and politically engaged, etc. And this fantasy opposes another – namely, the
image of English philosophy as being insulated from cultural and political concerns, hidden

34 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)

away in the secluded beauty of Oxbridge colleges. I should emphasize that all of what I say
in this connection is articulated at the level of cultural fantasy.

AH: Let me say something about social philosophy, because it is an intellectual field that
allows philosophers to play the role you just referred to. I think this is one really specific
element of the German tradition which to a great extent has to do with the Jewish influence
on the German tradition. I would say it is a kind of Jewish-German heritage and it starts,
I think, with German Idealism, especially in Hegel, but also in Fichte, if you think of how
some of the latterʼs writings are concerned with a diagnosis of his times. This tradition stems
from a Protestant movement, but then goes over to a secularized Jewish culture in Marx and
from that time has been part of the philosophical heritage in Germany. If you take people like
Georg Simmel or Martin Buber, or the early sociologists in Germany; if you take Benjamin
and Adorno; then this is something that I would describe in a very broad sense as social
philosophy. And there are even other influences which come together in this connection:
some of Max Schelerʼs writings offer a diagnosis of the time we are living in. So this is a
heritage which was quite powerful and which to a certain degree could survive, and is still an
important element of German philosophy in those places that are not dominated by a kind of
empty professionalism. In this connection, I would mention also Theunissen, who at a certain
period was doing nothing that one would call social philosophy; obviously Habermas; but also
a Catholic philosopher like Robert Spaemann, who I think is doing a kind of social philosophy,
in so far as he is offering a kind of critical understanding of certain social pathologies in
our present society. Although he would describe himself as a philosopher of language and
morality, Ernst Tugendhat could be understood as a social philosopher in this sense. So this is
a very important element of German philosophy and I would think it is one of the main tasks
of the younger generations to keep this tradition alive. If Henrich is right, if the situation of
my generation is really torn between empty professionalism and a kind of empty playfulness,
then the tradition of social philosophy would die out, and that would be dreadful.

What is critical in contemporary Critical Theory?

SC: That brings us neatly to our third and final topic. For if there is a tradition where social
philosophy is maintained, it is the intellectual tradition and school associated with the city
in which we are having this conversation, namely Frankfurt. One has become accustomed to
speak of three generations of Critical Theory: that of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse as the
first, and that of Habermas and Apel as the second. One also speaks, much more nebulously,
of a third generation, the most prominent member of which would be yourself.
But there is an interesting philosophical question for me in how the Habermasian impulse of
Critical Theory is to be continued, or not continued, supplemented or whatever. To my mind,
there are two possible routes being taken both here in Frankfurt and elsewhere. One of these
would see Critical Theory become part of mainstream political philosophy, what I would call
a sort of ʻleft Rawlsianismʼ – a tendency that would seem to be exacerbated by Habermasʼs
recent work on legal theory. The other route is to adopt the Habermasian discourse ethics
framework as offering a powerful theory of justice, but to claim, as you do, that it overlooks
the whole Hegelian dimension of the dialectical struggle for recognition, and in particular
what you call the first level of recognition – namely, the question of the private sphere, of
the development of the subject, questions of love, the family, or whatever. Before we go any
further, despite the interpretative violence of what I have said, does this sound like a fair
representation, in terms of these two routes?

AH: Yes, I think it is a fair description. But I would see more than you in the implications
of these two routes. The first route, which you describe more or less as ʻleft Rawlsianismʼ, to
my mind does entail a definitive end to the tradition of Critical Theory. It no longer really
represents the broader aims of that philosophical culture or school, because it would mean

Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 35

that Critical Theory is introduced into mainstream political theory or political philosophy and
would then give up its own identity. Maybe this is not a mistaken development. I do not want
to say it is wrong. I only want to say that this route would lead to the end of the tradition of
Critical Theory. But maybe that is a fruitful result; maybe that tradition is over. Maybe it is
simply an artificial aim to try to continue the tradition of Critical Theory, to continue it in a
world that has not only radically changed both socially and politically, but which has also been
transformed philosophically. Maybe it was even Habermasʼs indirect and unstated intention
to indicate in his later writings that this tradition canʼt be artificially kept alive any longer.
We should therefore combine the best elements of this tradition with mainstream political
philosophy and defend some stronger theory on this new terrain – what you would call ʻleft
Rawlsianismʼ. So this is one possible development. My only point is that it would no longer
make any sense to speak of this development in terms of Critical Theory.
The other route, which I would see myself as espousing, is to maintain and keep open
some of the broader ambitions of Critical Theory. I would call that a philosophically informed
social theory, which means that we are interested not only in describing or criticizing certain
important injustices of our society, but also in certain pathologies of our society. And I would
say that the main ambitions of the first generation of Critical Theory can be understood in that
way, even the extreme interest in art which is common to Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse and
even Horkheimer. I take it that the link between art and social pathology is that the former
can be seen as a kind of representational medium of the latter, or is a medium that is to some
extent free of these pathologies. Art is a placeholder for social pathologies.
So I would say the only chance we have to keep the tradition of Critical Theory alive is
to continue that kind of enterprise – namely, the social-philosophical enterprise of a kind of
diagnosis of our present culture, the pathologies of that culture, of a certain capitalist culture.
And that means a great deal; I mean it requires a lot of philosophical work. So I think your
description is right, and yet the consequences of these two directions are more radical than you
allow. The first route entails a dying out of the Critical Theory tradition; the second involves
the ambition to keep it alive. I donʼt want to suggest that it is easy to keep that tradition alive,
but I think itʼs the only chance we have if we want to do it.

SC: You have already begun to answer a related question that I wanted to pose, but let me
specify this a little further. It has become something of a truism to say, as I have heard you
say yourself, that Critical Theory moves between the poles of Kant and Hegel, recalling the
famous Kant oder Hegel debates of the 1980s. Now, in terms of the two routes I delineated,
one way of looking at what I call ʻleft Rawlsianismʼ is in terms of an increasingly Kantian
development in Critical Theory, whereas the other route could easily be seen to represent a
much more Hegelian tendency. So Critical Theory moves between the poles of Kant and Hegel.
But the question that I want to come back to, which was suggested by Elliot Jurist, is the issue
of what is critical in Critical Theory. If it moves between the poles of Kant and Hegel, then
what role do the three great ʻmasters of suspicionʼ continue to play in the project of Critical
Theory? Marx, Freud and Nietzsche: each of these thinkers, in distinct and nuanced ways, plays
an organizing function in the first generation of Critical Theory, most obviously in Adorno.
What role do the critiques of capital, of bourgeois morality and primacy of consciousness,
continue to play in the project of Critical Theory?

AH: That, I think, has to do with how one describes these two possible routes that Critical
Theory can take today. If it takes the Kantian route, then I think you would be right that the
masters of suspicion would no longer play an important role, perhaps with the exception of
Marx. Even the Habermas of contemporary legal theory is still very aware not so much of
Marx as of a Marxist tradition of critical economy. If there is ever to be something like a ʻleft
Rawlsianismʼ, then it would have to be highly influenced by the insights of a Marxist critical
economy. If I speak of the Hegelian route, my understanding of this tradition (which is not to
say it is there in Hegel himself) would include those components you mentioned – namely, the

36 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)

critical insights of the Nietzschean and the Freudian traditions. According to my own under-
standing of these matters, if you take a Hegelian route then you have a much more complex
understanding of the subject – that is, a richer account of the motivating drives in a society.
To adopt the picture of social pathologies means to include psychoanalytic components, and
maybe even components of Nietzscheʼs moral psychology. I am acutely aware of that. For
example, if you speak of recognition you canʼt be so naive as not to see the negative side of
it, which Nietzsche was aware of when he spoke of resentment. I think you have to broaden
out the moral psychology of Critical Theory, and you can do that only by incorporating
Freudian and Nietzschean elements. Taking the Hegelian route seriously would sooner or
later mean including the task of incorporating insights of that critical tradition. So I would
say that it is only the consequence of the present situation that these elements are not really
strongly enough represented.
But in describing the picture in the way you do, I think you underestimate the fact that
Critical Theory is not only represented by Habermas and his disciples. Even here in Frankfurt
there are other groups, other philosophers, who try to keep that critical tradition alive in a
more powerful way. If you think of somebody like Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, who is responsible
for the collected edition of Horkheimerʼs work, then I think he is now doing serious and
interesting work on Nietzscheʼs moral psychology and keeping that tradition alive within
Critical Theory.11 So my hope would be that in taking a Hegelian route, which for me does
not mean reducing Critical Theory to the enterprise of political philosophy defined by liberal
principles of justice, Critical Theory would include elements of tradition you mentioned and
keep alive the memory of Freud and Nietzsche.

SC: But do you think the language of pathology is sufficient to capture what you are after?
I suppose I have a rather naive problem with the language of social pathologies in so far as
pathology would seem to imply a dysfunctional behaviour. What I mean is that the language of
pathologies always seems to presuppose some normative conception of how these pathologies
might be overcome, or normalized – that is, that we could correct the social dysfunctioning
and return to a fully integrated Lebenswelt.

AH: I guess I think you canʼt do it without the language of pathologies. And even in Adorno
and Horkheimer, and especially Marcuse, although they would never talk of normal life or
normal society, the Critical Theory of society presupposes some vision of a society that
would exclude the sorts of damage they describe. So this kind of normative underpinning of
an enterprise like the critique of social pathologies is always there. I am fully aware of the
difficulties of the notion of pathologies, especially its roots in the quite complicated history
of which Foucault was most acutely aware: the deeply ambivalent history of normalization.
In this sense, pathology was mainly a conceptual means for creating or excluding subjects.
On the other hand, I simply donʼt have a better word for describing what Nietzsche was doing
when he described nihilism not only as a fruitful starting point for oneʼs own enterprise, but
also as the disastrous situation of European culture. Or what Freud was doing in his more
sociological writings in describing the situation of this present culture. I think one way to
approach this would be to describe such analyses as a diagnosis of social pathologies. Maybe
there are better words, but I would say that the task remains the same even if you find a
better word to describe it.

SC: Let us go to the last set of questions. If we (according to you) maintain the Hegelian
impulse in Critical Theory – that is (according to me), maintain the critical impulse in Critical
Theory – then the question this raises has to do with the nature of the philosophical task. I
would, first, want to assume against Rorty that there is a task for philosophy, and that this
task cannot be reduced to the business of literary criticism and journalism (not that these
are such bad things). What I mean is that critical impulse of Critical Theory – and not just
Critical Theory, but also in my view phenomenology and deconstruction – was always linked,
and rightly to my mind, to the emancipatory function of philosophy. Critique and utopia were

Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 37

 two ends of the same piece of string, in the sense that the critical impulse is maintained in
relationship to a utopian, transformative, emancipatory hope for thinking and for the world.
Now the first issue would be whether you agree with that, whether there is a philosophical
task and how the philosophical task of critique is linked to the question of emancipation and
the utopian element in Critical Theory. And the second question, if one accepts that, is how
the question of emancipation changes the philosophical task. What I mean by this is that
it seems to me that one of the things that the Frankfurt tradition inherits from Marx is a
certain conception of the poverty of philosophy. That is, if philosophy is going to be in the
business of reflecting upon what prevents and enables human emancipation, then it has to be
linked – essentially – to non-philosophy, whether we conceive that as sociology, aesthetics,
psychoanalysis or whatever. How do you see this set of issues?

AH: That is a most complicated question.

SC: Thatʼs for sure, which is why I asked it. Let me restate it more directly and slightly
nostalgically: how do you understand the relation between philosophy and praxis?

AH: I would like to answer in two steps. As a first step, I would simply like to say that even
the more conventional tasks of philosophy – for example, conceptual clarification of structures
of our practical behaviour – are kinds of emancipation. I think it would simply be nonsense
to say that philosophy in this sense is not internally linked to a kind of human emancipation,
if you understand emancipation as a process in which we gain autonomy by clarifying our
own as yet unknown dependencies and the elements of our situation. In that respect, this is a
kind of Habermasian answer: namely, that all philosophy represents a kind of emancipatory
interest of the human species.
But I think you have in mind a more restricted notion of emancipation, namely social
emancipation, and in that respect I also strongly believe, against Rorty, that there is a task
for philosophy today because there is no other place, and there is no other theoretical or
intellectual medium which allows us, with a certain intention of universality, to reflect on
systematic deficiencies of our own culture, our own society. I think it is wrong to say, as Rorty
does, that this is only a task for literature. It is clear that you can understand literature in such
a way, as a kind of medium for violations, deficiencies and ruptures of our life.

SC: For example, if we think of Rortyʼs rather good discussion of George Orwell.12

AH: Right. You could even say all literature is of that kind. It reflects or imagines or demon-
strates, by means of aesthetic mediation, those deficiencies, ruptures or traumas of everyday
life. But by definition that kind of literature is extremely subjective, and is meant to be so. It
is only fruitful as long as it represents an extremely radicalized subjective perspective on those
deficiencies. The question is: are there places, are there mediums, are there intellectual spaces,
in which we together as members of a society have the chance to find justifiable articulations
of those deficiencies? And I must say that the social sciences, which maybe in the beginning
played more or less that role, can no longer do so because of an excessive professionalization.
So I think this task goes over to philosophy. I think there has been a kind of change in the
intellectual division of labour in the last hundred years. If you look at the situation in which
sociology started, if you look to the first generation of famous sociologists – Max Weber, Émile
Durkheim, Georg Simmel – I would say that they started as social philosophers. There was
no really clear differentiation between philosophy and sociology in their work. They started
as theorists interested in a diagnosis of certain deficiencies, pathologies or crises of our own
culture. The professionalization of sociology has led it into other directions – piecemeal work
of a certain kind, very fruitful sometimes, less fruitful sometimes. But it no longer represents
the kind of conceptual space in which you can articulate those common and intersubjectively
articulated crises or deficiencies. So I think this role reverts to philosophy, which is where it
started from originally.

38 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)

 Itʼs an interesting historical process which you can observe from, letʼs say, Rousseau
until today. Rousseau was a kind of sociologist – his critique of culture is the first moment
of sociology – but he understood himself as a philosopher. Then you have a long period of
philosophy doing exactly that job. I mean that Hegel did that job, but not only Hegel; a lot
of his generation played that role, and we have John Stuart Mill in your own tradition. Then
that role goes over to sociology and was kept alive there for fifty years or so. But since the
Second World War, the professionalization of sociology has been so radical that now I think
it is a very necessary task of philosophy to resume that role. As I said, the role is one of
opening up a conceptual space in which we together can debate certain deficiencies of our
own life-world and culture with at least the hope for universality.

SC: And where would that lead? Wozu, as they say over here?

AH: To the opposite of what Rorty wants. That this task canʼt go over to literature. That there
is a necessary task for philosophy.

SC: So in that sense, if Rorty argues for the subordination of philosophy to democracy, then
you, like me, would want to make the opposite case.

AH: I would argue for a fruitful dialogue between a philosophy of the kind I have discussed
and a democratic culture, a democratic public. It would mean to say that we are the specialists
for the deficiencies of society – that we are, in a sense, the doctors of society. If we want to
be in dialogue with the public, then we cannot only be specialists. I think the whole idea of
subordination is wrong, whether it is a subordination of one type or the other.

SC: So philosophy is an essential moment of democratic reflection.

AH: Exactly. Itʼs a wonderful last word.

Conversation recorded in Frankfurt am Main, 7 January 1998

Notes
Simon Critchley would like to thank Noreen Harburt for her help in transcribing this exchange.
1. Dieter Henrich, Merkur, vol. 49, 1995, pp. 1055–63.
2. Habermas, Philosophisch-politische Profile, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1981, pp. 39–
64.
3. Henrich, p. 1060.
4. Michael Theunissen, The Other, trans. C. Macann, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1984.
5. See Karl-Otto Apel, ʻZurueck zur Normalitaet? Oder Koennten wir aus der nationalen Katastrophe
etwas Besonderes gelernt habenʼ, in Diskurs und Verantwortung, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am
Main, 1988, pp. 370–474.
6. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1997.
7. Andreas Wildt, Autonomie und Anerkennung: Hegels Moralitaetskritik im Lichte seiner Fichte-
Rezeption, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 1982.
8. Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. M. Eldred, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 1987.
Sloterdijkʼs early essay on Foucault is ʻMichel Foucaults strukturale Theorie der Geschichteʼ, Phi-
losophisches Jahrbuch, vol. 79, 1972, pp. 161 ff.
9. Henrich, p. 1059.
10. See Habermasʼs almost self-parodic characterization of Heidegger and postmodernism as part of a
critique of the reflexive modernization hypothesis in Beck and Giddens in his 1997 lecture, ʻJenseits
des Nationalstaats? Bemerkungen zu Folgeproblem der wirtschaflichen Globalisierungʼ (unpublished
typescript).
11. In this regard, see Schmid Noerrʼs article on Horkheimer in A Companion to Continental Phil-
osophy, edited by S. Critchley and W. Schroeder, Blackwell, Oxford and Cambridge MA, 1998, pp.
362–9.
12. Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, pp. 169–88.

Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 39

REVIEWS
Letter to Jane: on transference
Jane Gallop, Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, Duke University Press, Durham NC and London, 1997.
104 pp., £28.50 hb., £8.95 pb., 08 223 1925 X hb., 08 223 1918 7 pb.
Jane Gallop is an American academic whose writings
on psychoanalysis, feminism and related topics are as
dazzling in their intelligence as they are scintillating
in their wit. Their humour is part of the thought
processes embodied in her texts. A careful argu-
ment, proceeding by tentative steps, will finally reach
an explosive and paradoxical conclusion, inducing a
burst of laughter. It is in the laughter that one may
experience the spark of illumination. In the example
she offers of intellectual enquiry as a succession of
delights, with hard thought rewarded by a whoosh of
joy, she is one of the few worthy successors to Roland
Barthes. And it is from Barthes that she has learned
the technique of introducing disconcertingly personal
remarks, with precise appropriateness, into the flow
of lucidly abstract reasoning.
Barthes declared the relationship between writer
and reader to be inherently erotic. Awareness of this
fact enables a skilled writer to explore and expand
the field of textual seductions. One writes (as Barthes
also emphasized) in order to be loved. In the rhythms
of her thinking, in the contact (intimate yet elegant)
she establishes with her reader, Gallop is a very sexy
writer.
For my part I can think of no one I would prefer,
had the opportunity arisen, to supervise my academic
work, both because of the topics Gallop discusses and
her approach to them. Nor am I alone in this feeling
of intellectual and emotional attraction. One of Gal-
lopʼs graduate students, soon after first attending her
lectures, became ʻjittery with excitementʼ (so Gallop
tells us on p. 54), and ʻblurted out that she wanted me
to be her advisorʼ – a relationship to which Gallop
willingly agreed. Two years later, however, this same
student made an official complaint of sexual harass-
ment against her. The University authorities proceeded
to investigate this and another, similar, complaint. In
the North American media there was a fair amount of
interest in this unusual accusation of sexual harassment
brought by female students against a noted feminist
intellectual. Now Gallop has written a book about the
affair. In a society where the judgements of the media
40 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)
often count for more than the decisions of judicial
authorities, such a text inevitably has the status of a
public defence against public accusations. Only because
Gallop is a well-known intellectual, however, can she
publish her own hundred-page account of the matter.
The two students involved have no such access to an
international audience. Their voices are silenced, or
made available only through Gallopʼs quotations. This
difference in power between the disputants in the case,
a differential on which it turns, is exemplified by the
very existence of the book that discusses it.
The legal process through which the students sought
redress was itself, however, a form of silencing of their
distinctive experiences. Gallop notes that the official
complaint forms completed by the two students (acting,
no doubt, on legal advice) were virtually identical
in their wording (pp. 77–8). The specificity of the
experience of each was thus erased. The individual
and particular difficulties of their respective encounters
with power and desire had been subsumed under the
generic category ʻsexual harassmentʼ.
Precisely such a subsumption was already implied,
however, in the feminist analyses which originally led
to the recognition of sexual harassment as a crime.
Gallopʼs summary is succinct:
Sexual harassment is a feminist issue, not because it
is sexual but because it disadvantages women. Be-
cause harassment makes it harder for women to earn
a living, feminists declared it a form of discrimina-
tion against women. This framing was so persuasive
that, within a few years, harassment was added to
the legal definition of sex discrimination (p. 9).
As a feminist category, therefore, ʻsexual harassmentʼ
identifies a structural imbalance of power between men
and women in their working and studying environment,
and seeks to correct this. Yet the use of the accusation
by two female students against a female professor goes
further than this: it seems to question the structural
imbalance of power between teachers and students in
general.
The imbrication of power, knowledge and desire in
any and all teaching situations has been recognized

(and recognized as problematic) at least since Plato.
Gallop is well aware of this fact, and also knows that
psychoanalysis has given a particular name to this
effect: transference.
Patient and analyst, student and teacher, undergo a
process of amorous entwinement at the end of which, in
the ideal and perhaps mythical case, the patient is freed
from his or her obsessions, and intelligent autonomous
understanding is induced in the pupil. Both Plato and
Freud add an important proviso to their accounts of
this process: it only works if the two partners refrain
from consummating their ardour for each other in a
direct and physical way. Freud took great pains to warn
psychoanalysts not to engage in sexual congress with
their patients, an act which would be the opposite of
therapeutic. Plato ends The Symposium with Alcibi-
ades telling of his failed attempt to seduce Socrates
– a failure which increases his respect for the noble
imperturbability of the philosopher.
Despite a passing reference to Plato (p. 59), Gallop
remains strangely silent about these classical claims
for restraint, which are not based on any disapproval
of sexual activity per se. Her book celebrates her own
occasional experiences of sex with her teachers at
university (escapades which have clearly not impaired
her intellectual development) and, in the past, with
some of her own students.
Gallop did not, in fact, have sexual intercourse with
either of the students who accused her of harassment.
She was, however, found guilty of the ʻless seriousʼ
charge of conducting a ʻconsensual amorous relationʼ,
which ʻdid not involve sex actsʼ, with one of them (p.
34). Hence she was found guilty of encouraging that
state of transference which, her own psychoanalytic
beliefs would imply, is a necessary condition of all
productive teaching (p. 56). The university judges
love (the ʻamorousʼ) to be less serious than sex: an
attitude not conducive to understanding the transfer-
ential process. Psychoanalysts are trained in handling
the transference (which is not to say that they always
do so successfully); teachers might well benefit from
similar instruction. Knowledge is not a commodity,
neutrally passed from one mind to another. As Gallop
realizes, the distress of her experience – and (though
she doesnʼt mention it) the distress of her studentsʼ
experiences – is a position from which new knowledge
can be produced: ʻThe spectacle taught me a thing or
twoʼ (p. 7).
The students, too, learned something about power.
It would seem that Gallop, whom they loved, was no
longer supporting the direction their intellectual enquir-
ies were taking. ʻMore than once I told the student
her work was not satisfactory; she did not accept
my judgments and became increasingly suspicious
and angryʼ (p. 55). Since Gallop was supervising her
studies, this negative judgement could determine both
the studentʼs grades and her academic future. What
do you do when someone you love has that degree
of power over you? What the student did was try to
break off the relationship completely, her accusation
of harassment conveying the request that Gallop no
longer supervise or direct her studies. To make the
break in this manner, with its invocation of legal
procedures, was obviously aggressive. But could such
a break ever be made without aggression? ʻBecause so
much passion had been invested in our relationship,
the failure was particularly dramaticʼ, says Gallop (p.
55). If all teaching involves transferential love, then
such explosions are an inevitable danger.
Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 41

Margaret Stratton, Justice on TV, from A Guide to the Wasteland, 1991–1993
Was Gallop right in her low opinion of the stu-
dentʼs work? We donʼt know. To form any judgement
ourselves, examples of the studentsʼ writings would
have had to be included in Gallopʼs book. But, as
I have said, their voices are silenced. At one point
Gallop does, however, quote a single sentence from
the harassment complaint of one of the students, and
disdainfully refers to ʻthe studentʼs stylistic proclivity
to pulp fictionʼ (p. 98). The sentence is a description
of a kiss between the two women in the public context
of a gay bar: ʻShe mashed her lips against mine and
shoved her tongue in my mouth.ʼ Gallop brings her
skills in literary criticism to bear on this sentence,
analysing its rhetoric of ʻa passive and innocent victim
… violent verbs, images of forced penetrationʼ.
Seven pages earlier, Gallop had given her own
description of that kiss: ʻSomehow the usual goodbye
peck suddenly became a real kiss. I donʼt actually know
42 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)
who started it. I know it surprised me and seemed to
occur simultaneously to both of us, as if spontaneously
generated out of the momentʼ (p. 91). Gallopʼs prose
here is equally influenced by pulp fiction, though her
chosen genre is sentimental romance rather than an
aggressive thriller. How can we, placed in the position
of a jury, possibly decide which of these descriptions
is the more accurate? Is the case (between a professor
of English and her pupil) to be decided on the grounds
of style? If the studentʼs ʻstylistic proclivitiesʼ were
one reason for criticizing her academic work, might
Gallop have been reacting with particular hostility
because she shared such proclivities herself? (In the
same way, in an earlier age, a female teacher might
have reacted with particular horror to a studentʼs
lesbian advances if she were fighting against similar
ʻproclivitiesʼ within herself.)
The rhetoric of Gallopʼs prose contains the familiar
defence, in cases of sexual harassment, that the other
person started it, or was at least equally responsible.
Such an appeal to equality denies the pertinent differ-
ence in status. As a teacher, Gallop has the more
ʻresponsibleʼ social position, and her actions will be
judged by a more stringent standard.
In 1972 Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin
made a film called Letter to Jane. The Jane in question
was Fonda, who had worked with them the previous
year on Tout Va Bien. Their ʻletterʼ takes the form of
friendly criticism, and is devoted, for its entire sixty-
minute length, to an analysis of a single newspaper
photograph of Fonda in Vietnam. Godard and Gorin
question the value of her trip to Vietnam, which, like
her involvement in their own film, was one of her
radical activities during that phase of her life. Indeed,
this was part of the problem: that the situation in
Vietnam would be projected as a phase in the life of a
film star, for the benefit of her fans. The photographers
would be taking pictures of her, rather than the people
she was talking to. This was not her fault, of course,
but Godard and Gorin question whether her admirable
intentions sufficiently took into account the nature of
her own status as a media star. We might equally ask
whether Gallop, in her actions with respect to the
students, and in publishing her book, has sufficiently
taken into account her own status, as both teacher
and writer.
Jane Gallop is less widely known than Fonda, but
she has her fans. This new book of hers, as well as
being her most personal text, has a photograph of
her on the back cover for the first time. Thus this is
the first time her readers have known what she looks
like. Given the transferential nature of reading, is this
a further step towards seducing us (the neck of her
shirt open, her lips slightly parted, her eyes direct
and appealing)? In the course of the text, however,
she warns us that she no longer has affairs with
students, and has been monogamous for several years.
The reason for her monogamy is that she is ʻmadly in
love with the man I am still happily with todayʼ (p.
48). Gallop testifies to the power of love, which can
override all other temptations for a bisexual feminist
of liberal sexual views, such as herself. This power
alone might be sufficient to weigh against the power
differential of a teacher and a student.
One target of the polemical aspects of her book
is the policy now being adopted by most American
universities forbidding all sexual relationships (even
consensual ones) between students and staff. The
fact that a particular form of sexual relationship is
forbidden, or even illegal, will not of course prevent
it from taking place. (The history of homosexuality
is sufficient proof of this.) But the context in which
it occurs will be significantly different. A professor
who sleeps with a student risks losing his or her job
– risks scandal, unemployment, loss of status. Perhaps
only the power of intense love would be sufficient to
impel such a risk.
In his consideration of Kantʼs ethical theory
(Seminar VII, Routledge, 1992, pp. 108–9), Lacan
comments on the well-known passage in which Kant
contends that no one would commit fornication if they
knew that a hangmanʼs noose awaited them as a direct
consequence (whereas they might, in such circum-
stances, perform a moral action). Kant knows nothing
about love, declares Lacan. He does not understand
a romantic love which would itself be a categorical
imperative, embracing death if necessary to attain its
aim. A myriad texts (both popular and classic) invite
us to view in a favourable light those acts of love which
lead to personal and professional ruin.
I would not wish to advocate such extremes of
masochism. If a student wholly consents to a sexual
relationship, there is no reason why it should ever
come to the knowledge of the authorities. But by
agreeing to such a relationship, the teacher puts power
into the studentʼs hands. The imbalance of power
between them (with the professor able to determine
the studentʼs grades) is violently tilted the other way
(with the student able to ruin the professorʼs career).
For good or ill, the student would be granted an
immense sense of their own erotic power. Hence in
academic institutions this restrictive rule not only
invites transgression (as rules are apt to do), but alters
the context and possibilities of transferential relation-
ships. It acts against the power relations inscribed in
the educational system, in the same way that femi-
nism acts against the power relations inscribed in the
gender system.
Few would disagree with Gallop when she contends
that ʻsexual harassment is a feminist issue not because
it is sexual but because it disadvantages womenʼ (p. 9).
But she goes on to argue that ʻsexual harassment is
criminal not because it is sex but because it is dis-
criminationʼ (p. 10). She justifies this contention by
reference to the American legal code, which identifies
harassment as a subcategory of sex discrimination.
Others might argue that the behaviour has been gener-
ally recognized as criminal, not because it is sexual, or
because it is discriminatory, but because it is harass-
ment of a subordinate by someone in power. Hence the
category begins to ʻdrift from its feminist frameʼ (p.
11). Such a drift (which Gallop deplores) enables the
analysis of justice initiated by feminism to be deployed
in other social fields. It is difficult to see why this
should be inimical to the feminist project itself.
In an ideal world, men and women, students and
teachers, would engage in free and equal sexual
relationships, impelled by pleasure and tenderness.
Recognizing the inequalities in our present world
is a necessary precondition for bringing that ideal a
little closer.
Peter Benson
Morality, blood and
shit
Amitai Etzioni, The New Golden Rule: Community
and Morality in a Democratic Society, Profile Books,
London, 1997. xxii + 314 pp., £12.99 pb., 1 86197
039 0.
After his lightweight and largely unconvincing The
Spirit of Community, Etzioni has consolidated his
reputation as the leading figure of the communitarian
movement with a more searching text. Heavily refer-
enced, repetitive, and prolix at times, The New Golden
Rule nevertheless engages more deliberately with the
debate between individualism and social conservatism
in political philosophy, and attempts to promote com-
munitarianism as a viable middle way.
Etzioni writes from a position he himself describes
as ʻneo-functionalistʼ, citing Durkheim and Parsons
among other communitarian ancestors. His concern
is for societal equilibrium – for an acceptable balance
between social order and individual autonomy. Up
to a certain point, he argues, autonomy and order,
Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 43
rights and responsibilities, are mutually beneficial,
with the growth of one side of the social formation
enhancing the other. Autonomy contributes to societal
order, for example, by making a social system ʻmetast-
ableʼ, enabling it to adapt spontaneously to changes in
the external environment or its internal composition.
Order contributes to autonomy, on the other hand, by
humanizing peopleʼs animal instincts, protecting them
from irrational drives and whimsical motivations, and
lending self-discipline and communicative coherence
to their actions.
The constant maximization of either of these terms,
however, takes society beyond the ʻmutually enhancing
zone of inverting symbiosisʼ, leading to sharp and
undesirable conflict. While Etzioni regards Britain as
a ʻrelatively communitarianʼ society, his belief is that
from the 1960s to the 1980s the USA suffered from a
growing deficit in moral order. The incessant growth
in individual liberties over this period consequently
undermined the moral infrastructure that undergirds
those liberties. The result was excessive individualism,
anti-social behaviour, litigiousness, and even ʻanarchyʼ.
In other societies, such as conservative East Asian
states, social order is prioritized to the detriment of
peopleʼs liberties. Such countries suffer from exces-
sive collectivism and border on authoritarian – even
totalitarian – regimes.
Etzioniʼs ʻgolden ruleʼ is basically to minimize the
conflict (which he concedes can never be eliminated)
between order and autonomy, essentially by persuading
people to meet the ʻvirtuousʼ demands of social order
voluntarily, and by limiting these demands to the
affirmation of core values. This means, he explains,
avoiding the forcible imposition of external duties by
instead increasing ʻthe realm of responsibilities one
believes one should discharge and that one believes one
is fairly called upon to assumeʼ. This enhancement of
responsibility is not produced by resource allocation
and practical empowerment, but rather by ʻthe moral
voice of the community, [by] education, persuasion,
and exhortationʼ. Indeed, in Etzioniʼs account it is
precisely because order in ʻgood communitarian socie-
ties relies heavily on normative meansʼ that ʻthe social
order of good societies is a moral orderʼ.
Etzioni also believes that communitarianism offers
a more realistic view of human nature. For Enlighten-
ment liberals humans are inherently benign crea-
tures requiring only the right environment for them
to flourish. For social conservatives individuals are
ʻfallenʼ beings whose greatest weapon against the
temptations of sin is discipline and punishment. Com-
munitarianism, Etzioni maintains, takes a ʻdynamicʼ or
ʻdevelopmentʼ view of the person. It acknowledges that
44 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)
humans are born savage, but believes they can attain
a modest level of virtue given the right socialization
and normative environment. Not only must societyʼs
values be fully internalized in childhood, however, but
they must also be continually reinforced amongst adult
communities. This is because there always remains an
unsocialized ʻanimal baseʼ or ʻresidueʼ of anti-social
predispositions which, if left unchecked, will steadily
degrade ʻthe good and virtuous character of those who
have acquired itʼ.
The range of values which a communitarian society
can sustain, without subjecting its members to coercion
or requiring of them heroic self-discipline, is therefore
limited. Even so, these values must, Etzioni argues, be
ʻthickʼ rather than ʻthinʼ values. That is, they must be
anchored in precontractual commitments and cultural
attachments, and not simply accepted by people for
tactical or procedural reasons, or ʻbecause they fear
public authorities or are driven by economic incen-
tivesʼ.
The ʻcore valuesʼ outlined by Etzioni as lying at the
heart of a communitarian moral order include a nor-
mative commitment to democracy ʻas the best system
there isʼ; the shared conceptions of minority rights and
liberties enshrined in the US Constitution and Bill of
Rights; respect for other cultures and communities; a
willingness to divide oneʼs loyalties between the dif-
ferent layers of society and to accord priority to the
overarching community on certain issues; a rejection
of the kind of exclusionary identity politics which
denies the reality of multiple group membership; and
a commitment to a shared core language.
Etzioni is particularly sensitive to the charge of
moral relativism which liberal communitarians like
Walzer have encountered. He argues that a com-
munityʼs values may be regarded as valid so long
as they have been democratically endorsed by the
members of that community and, additionally, so long
as they do not violate a higher set of society-wide,
and ultimately global (universal), normative criteria
(such as the satisfaction of basic welfare needs). The
widespread acceptance of some concept of human
rights, however variable in precise definition, suggests
to Etzioni that the basis for a global set of core values
already exists.
Lastly, and most dubiously, Etzioni crowns his
moral hierarchy with a final touchstone. In defiant
challenge to the liberal rationalist, he observes that
certain values ʻpresent themselves to us as morally
compelling in and of themselvesʼ. One perplexing
example of this, which clearly fails to explain Etzioniʼs
equation of normative values with societal order, is that
ʻwe have higher moral obligations to our own children
than to the children of othersʼ. More ambitiously,
Etzioni returns to the ʻgolden ruleʼ, initially justified
by a functionalist argument which, the writer con-
cludes, is in fact ʻsecondaryʼ: ʻThe needs for voluntary
social order and for well-protected opportunities for
individuals to express themselves speak compellingly
for themselves.… The validity of the dual primary
concepts … is self-evident.ʼ
The New Golden Rule is not an especially eloquent
or well-constructed book, and Etzioniʼs arguments are
most notably weakened by a loose and inconsistent use
of what would otherwise be pivotal terms. Probably
the greatest deficiency lies in the authorʼs concept of
the ʻtwin virtuesʼ of social order and autonomy. The
most obvious interpretation of this distinction renders
it synonymous with the idea, popularized in the social
sciences by the likes of Habermas and Gorz, of the
differentiation of modern society into system and
lifeworld, or heteronomous and autonomous spheres.
Closer inspection, however, reveals this not to be the
case.
Etzioniʼs dual concepts are in fact reducible to
an unsatisfactory division between the ʻsocialʼ and
the ʻindividualʼ. The social refers, in his account, to
action which is congruent with the central cultural,
legal and regulatory institutions of society – action
which meets that societyʼs functional need for stability
and continuity. Societyʼs needs define, a priori, such
action as virtuous, though Etzioni of course objects to
compliance not based on conscientious consent. The
individual, on the other hand, is essentially synony-
mous with the negative concept of liberty – with the
freedom to ʻdo your own thingʼ. Etzioni regards this
individualism, so long as it is enjoyed within specified
boundaries, as both a valid achievement of modernity
and, more noticeably, as a functional prize conducive
to societal flexibility and therefore stability. Etzioniʼs
declared interest in the mutual importance of social
order and autonomy is therefore false. Societal repro-
duction is the primary virtue, while ʻautonomyʼ is
negatively portrayed as a capricious anti-social individ-
ualism tolerated by society within limits. The reader
might presume that when Etzioni talks about autonomy
he is actually referring to peopleʼs voluntary consent
to the norms and laws (the ʻdutiesʼ) which maintain
social order. But since he defines a ʻgood societyʼ as
one in which most people (ʻas many as 98 percentʼ),
ʻmost of the timeʼ, ʻabide voluntarily by the moresʼ,
this interpretation cannot be correct. Such a society
would clearly cease to have the balance between equal
order and autonomy which Etzioni advocates.
By refusing to formulate a positive conception of
autonomy, Etzioni thus disguises the fact that social
systems exceed the communicative horizons, the per-
sonal responsibilities and moral autonomy of individ-
uals. In doing so, he fails to recognize that it is the
defiance of social norms and regulations by individu-
als trying to transform society (and themselves) in
responsible and collective ways which is the cradle
of morality. Indeed, were Etzioni more alert to the
scarcity of moral autonomy in modern societies – of
the practical responsibility that comes from being able
to understand, want and reconcile the intentions and
the consequences of oneʼs actions – then the activity of
transforming, rather than merely reproducing, society
would surely claim a higher moral standing.
Industrial capitalism revolutionized humanityʼs
struggle with the environment, but magnified its pro-
ductive power and efficiency at the cost of alienation,
inequality, and a continual reinvention or ʻmoderniza-
tionʼ of scarcity. The revolutions that destroyed the
feudal order did indeed give birth to a cultural concep-
tion of the citizen which eventually mitigated the worst
excesses of capitalism with civil, political and welfare
rights. But the legal, political and social institutions of
modernity, if they were to be at all effective, in turn
had to confer on individuals an abstract social identity,
to address them as universal and impersonal beings.
Hence morality in the modern world is necessarily
an incomplete and ambiguous ideal. It refers not to
obligation and obedience, but to the complex and
contradictory struggle to push back the apparatuses
of society, to enlarge the space and capacity for civi-
lized and autonomous social relations, to challenge not
simply inequality with justice, but also equality with
reciprocity, societal rights and duties with concrete
personal responsibilities, abstract individualism with
autonomous forms of solidarity and friendship.
Instead of Etzioniʼs invocation of the ʻmoral voiceʼ
(which says ʻI oughtʼ, as he puts it, rather than ʻI
would likeʼ), we need a conception of moral autonomy
which takes account of the paradoxical nature of
modernity. We should avoid the complacency with
which Etzioni cherishes the sense of ʻennoblementʼ
conferred by acts of ʻvalue affirmationʼ – fighting
for oneʼs country, he suggests, or giving to charity,
protecting the environment, or volunteering to work
in the Third World. Can one really go to war without
feeling diminished by the deaths of the innocent? Can
one help the poor without exonerating the rich, boycott
the tyrant without afflicting the tyrannized, preserve
nature without destroying jobs? Can one transform the
world for the better without an instrumental attitude,
without creating enemies and choosing sides, without
tarnishing the purity of oneʼs intentions by treating
some people as things?
Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 45
 Instead of Etzioniʼs championing of the noble
patriot, I prefer Zygmunt Baumanʼs observation that
ʻone can recognize a moral person by their never
quenched dissatisfaction with their moral performanceʼ.
Or else there is Hoederer in Sartreʼs Les Mains sales,
a Communist risking coalition with royalist and liberal
politicians to form a front against the Germans. He
knows he cannot claim moral purity. ʻMy hands are
filthyʼ, he admits. ʻIʼve dipped them up to the elbows
in blood and shit. So what? Do you think you can
govern and keep your spirit white?ʼ
Finn Bowring
Renewing aesthetic
theory
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert
Hullot-Kentor, University of Minnesota Press, Min-
neapolis, 1997. xxi + 366 pp., £40.00 hb., 0 8166
1799 6.
Aesthetic Theory is Adornoʼs late magnum opus and
among the most significant works on aesthetics of the
twentieth century. Written over a period of almost
fifteen years, it was posthumously published in 1970,
a year after Adornoʼs unexpected death. Although
partly unfinished, it is for the most part the highly
crafted product of a career dedicated to thinking about
art as a crucial feature of modernity. Not only does
it rework Adornoʼs previous research around new cat-
egories – specifically mimesis – but, in an extension
of his preoccupation with the problem of philosophical
presentation, it offers a radical restructuring of the
philosophical text.
Most explicitly, Aesthetic Theory is an attempt to
establish why and how it is through modern autono-
mous art that truth and freedom are to be revealed in
developed capitalist societies. For Adorno, capitalism
involves the instrumental reduction of consciousness
to the identity of the value form of capitalist exchange.
Autonomous art – art which has an identity independent
of predetermined needs – therefore becomes a crucial
source of resistance and critique of the instrumental
identity of capitalist society. Autonomous art is thus
true in a double and inflected sense: in its non-identity
with capitalist society, it bears the scars of capitalismʼs
usually concealed antagonism; in the self-identity it
constructs as the condition of this non-identity, it
indicates a truth that does not as yet exist – a utopian
glimpse of freedom. It is through this complex diag-
nosis of autonomous art that Adorno draws on the
traditional category of mimesis to transform Platoʼs
46 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)
classic delimitation of art as a mere semblance or
illusion of truth.
Although partly anticipated by Benjamin, Adornoʼs
account of mimesis is original in its redemption of this
classical aesthetic term as the fundamental category
with which to think the most modern autonomous art.
Adorno argues that autonomous artʼs development of
its own self-identity institutes an alternative to the
instrumental form of identity which, for Plato, art
merely fails to achieve. For Adorno, this alternative
form of identity – based on the non-instrumental
affinity between the elements of artʼs construction – is
mimesis. Non-autonomous art subordinates mimetic
identity-with to an instrumental identity-as. Thus, for
Adorno, even art which is a vehicle for a politically
emancipatory message participates in instrumental
identity relations and, paradoxically, would even betray
the explicit intentions of a message of non-domina-
tion. It is through this development of mimesis into a
critique of rationality, and the emergence of a dialectic
of mimesis and rationality as the dynamic formation of
modern art, that Aesthetic Theory achieves its general
philosophical significance.
If Adornoʼs status in Germany has been diminished
with the ascendency of Habermasʼs refiguring of Criti-
cal Theory, in the Anglophone world his significance
is growing fast, nourished by numerous translations
and increasingly extensive critical literature. Robert
Hullot-Kentorʼs new translation of Aesthetic Theory
is an important contribution to these developments. In
many ways it is the exorbitant fulfilment of what can,
at least retrospectively, be read as the promise of his
outspoken critique of Christian Lenhardtʼs previous
English translation. (Lenhardtʼs translation was pub-
lished by Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, in 1984.
For Hullot-Kentorʼs critique and Lenhardtʼs reply, see
Telos, no. 65, Fall 1985, pp. 143–52.) Thus, it bears
the first major fruits of the highly critical reception
of Adornoʼs rather pedestrian early translation into
English: together with Aesthetic Theory, the transla-
tions of both Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative
Dialectics – the three milestones of Adornoʼs work
– have been fiercely criticized.
The basic charge involved in Hullot-Kentorʼs cri-
tique, which according to Lenhardtʼs reply should also
be extended to his publisher, was that he had failed to
take seriously crucial features of Ästhetische Theorie
in an attempt to render the book consumable by an
Anglophone readership: a readership which for Hullot-
Kentor is crucially American. In particular, Lenhardt
failed to reproduce Adornoʼs specific structuring of the
text, although this was merely the most overt symptom
of serious mistranslations of crucial ideas.
 In an attempt to develop Benjaminʼs notion of a
constellational structure for the presentation of ideas,
Adorno radicalized his technique, partly used in Nega-
tive Dialectics, of structuring the text by extended
paragraphs without headings, starting a new paragraph
for each sub-section of the chapter, and a break in
the page to indicate a new chapter. This austere text
without headings is indexed by a contents page to
enable readers to find their way around the text by
page number. This was Adornoʼs manifest attempt to
resist the inherent linear form of conventional philo-
sophical presentation.
Lenhardtʼs translation completely ignored this. Not
only did it entitle each new chapter and sub-section
with their indexed headings, but it even numbered each
sub-section, thereby actively enforcing a linear struc-
ture. Lenhardtʼs further attempts to domesticate the
text involved cutting up the sub-sections into smaller
paragraphs, thereby arbitrarily dislocating Adornoʼs
lapidary syntax, which consequently often demanded
conjunctive phrases that, in their purely lubricative
function, were completely alien to the paratactical
form of the original.
Hullot-Kentor is rigorous in his refusal of any such
domesticating revisions, and attempts to reproduce
the original in all its complexity and difficulty. All
too aware of the appropriative function of transla-
tion, Hullot-Kentorʼs self-understanding of his task
as a translator is conceived by analogy with Adornoʼs
critique of non-autonomous culture and its deepen-
ing during his exile in America. Hullot-Kentor reads
Lenhardtʼs translation as the tragically predictable
appropriation of Adornoʼs achievements by an Ameri-
can mass cultural mediocrity. If Lenhardt was to claim
that Aesthetic Theory was already outdated by the
simultaneous translation of Peter Bürgerʼs Theory of
the Avant-Garde (1974; trans. 1984), then for Hullot-
Kentor, Lenhardtʼs lack of rigour had merely reinforced
this obsolescence by misconstruing Adornoʼs original-
ity as mere outdatedness. For Hullot-Kentor, Aesthetic
Theoryʼs obsolescence has been accelerated by its
consumerist renewal and his task is to redeem the origi-
nality of what appears obsolete, thereby enabling what
Martin Jay refers to on the jacket as a ʻsecond chanceʼ.
Yet whatever the undoubted merits of Hullot-
Kentorʼs translation – which needs to be assessed with
greater expertise – his own theorization of it tends to
deal with the problem of Adornoʼs obsolescence by
internalizing obsolescence as a structural condition of
Adornoʼs originality. This produces an interpretative
model which threatens profound misinterpretations of
the crucial historical temporality at stake in Adornoʼs
thought.
Adornoʼs temporalization of his aesthetics explicitly
and determinately privileges the temporal modality of
ʻthe newʼ. Although redemption is an essential feature
of Adornoʼs historical hermeneutics, the new is the
privileged site of interpretation through which the past
is redeemed. Hence Adornoʼs modernist investment
in the most recent products of modern art. This is
in marked opposition to Heideggerʼs hermeneutics of
repetition and its radical conservatism. For Adorno,
the homology of modern autonomous art and the
accelerated newness of commodity fetishism is integral
to Aesthetic Theory, and defines its refusal of the
delusion that the art of the past has somehow resisted
commodification. Autonomous art emerges through an
internal disengagement with commodity fetishism.
If, as Hullot-Kentor writes, ʻMuch of what catches
the eye as obsolete in Aesthetic Theory is what
would be new if it were not blockedʼ, that process of
unblocking should occur through investigating new
art, and not the radicalization of its obsolescence.
Whatever difficulties this presents for an inherently
conservative academic culture – which is finally no
consolation for consumerism – if Aesthetic Theory is
to become renewed most radically, then its distinctive
conception of renewal needs to be recognized.
Stewart Martin
The elusive
citizenship of the
kingdom of ends
Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996. xv +
273 pp., £35.00 hb., £12.95 pb., 0 521 55059 9 hb.,
0 521 55960 X pb.
It may now be possible to tackle the stalemate between
supporters of the humanist agenda of an ever-expanding
ʻparty of humanityʼ and the motley crew of sceptics,
ironists, communitarians, nationalists and feminists
even, by the use of an interesting new conception:
the notion of ʻpractical identityʼ introduced into moral
philosophy by Christine M. Korsgaard, and received
with incredulity by well-known philosophers in this
gripping work. Edited by Onora OʼNeill, it comprises
the revised text of, and comments on, the 1992 Tanner
Lectures on Human Values delivered by Korsgaard in
Cambridge. The lectures seek an answer to the ʻnorma-
tive questionʼ: what justifies the claims morality makes
on us? According to Korsgaard, it must be asked and
Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 47
answered in the first person; any answer that justifies
moralityʼs claim on us must appeal to our sense of
who we are. Thus, in order to understand how and why
ethical concepts have a grip on me, I must appreciate
the mediating role of my practical identity.
That Korsgaard dares to introduce non-Kantian
distinctions and concepts into an established discourse,
while claiming to be a legitimate member of that very
lineage, is in itself a reason why her book should be
read. Her previous work, notably ʻPersonal Identity and
the Unity of Agency: A Kantian Response to Parfitʼ,
was a pertinent attack on the move to undermine the
notion of identity by metaphysical arguments; she
reminded us of the ʻpracticalʼ basis of identity. Here
is a thought-provoking philosopher who is generous in
her sweep and undeterred in her pursuit of invigorating
Kantʼs moral philosophy. Although more fully devel-
oped in her later book, the idea that people obligate
us because they are people, and that this is the source
of moralityʼs hold on us, is a simple yet effective
answer to the normative question: not all demands
from outside of oneself are irksome constraints. The
demands of love and attention, of engagement and reci-
procity, are what make us human. Our human or moral
identity induces our obligation to other people.
At first glance, the popular interpretations of Kant
might make one cautious of Korsgaardʼs defence of
a reconstructed Kantian moral philosophy. Does her
appeal to practical identity really answer the objections
of ʻempty formalismʼ raised against Kant? Korsgaard
grants that considering myself a legislative member of
the Kingdom of Ends is one among many descriptions
under which I can value myself. Our practical identities
provide the content of our moral obligations. Being
thus governed by the moral law, my self-identification
as a human being is always, as it were, looming in the
background. If it comes to a clash, Korsgaard would
say that it is ʻbetter for us to think of ourselves …
just as human beings than, say, as men or womenʼ
(p. 117). However, in her constructivist mode, she also
emphasizes that ʻthe fact that we can never escape
viewing the world from somewhere is not a regrettable
limitationʼ (p. 245). For example, presumably the fact
that some of us are bound by our shared experience
as women, and that for some of us this provides a
vantage-point, is also not a regrettable limitation. So
what is meant by ʻbetter for usʼ would seem to be an
expression of the hope of achieving an as yet distant
humanitarian goal of equal respect and genuine reci-
procity. In the interim period, there are good reasons
to cherish our ʻpractical identityʼ – in the example to
hand, as women, if that is a description under which
we value our lives now.
48 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)
The conception of practical identity, in my view, has
enormous mediating potential. Ironists, while arguing
against any essential identification, have reason to
welcome the element of practicality in identification.
Nationalists and communitarians, while resenting
the implication that value-conferring identifications
possess a merely ʻpracticalʼ validity, have reason to
welcome the element of self-identification. Feminists
standing on both sides of the divide have reason
to welcome the work of a woman philosopher who,
although not explicitly acknowledging it, does seem
to have taken on board their challenge to make moral
philosophy relevant to the lives of people. Korsgaard
makes moral philosophy relevant not by ʻapplyingʼ
ready-made concepts to neglected areas of concern, but
by envisioning a revision of the concepts themselves.
One significant distinction that Korsgaard makes
is between the categorical imperative and the moral
law (p. 99). Whilst a mafioso might be categorically
bound by his conception of the imperative to be loyal
to his family, his loyalty cannot be a law. For it to be
a candidate conception of the moral law, he must ask
why he endorses his loyalty. This further reflection
dictates a further endorsement – this time, of his
identity as a human being who must respond to the
needs of others for whom he is especially responsible.
The step from his practical identity as a mafioso to
his practical identity as a citizen of the Kingdom of
Ends is thus possible. By granting rationality to the
mafiosoʼs ʻpractical identityʼ as a mafioso, Korsgaard
elevates the role of ʻself-identificationʼ in grounding
motivations to be moral.
G.A. Cohen, who introduces the mafioso example in
his comments, complains that Korsgaardʼs arguments
do not ʻdistinguish the Mafioso ethic from moral-
ityʼ, and therefore fail to ʻmove us beyond the mere
phenomenology of obligation to providing a more
specifically moral obligationʼ (p. 187). His other main
criticism is that the argument from practical identity
might serve as a reply when a moral being is asked
why she bothers to be moral; but it cannot be used
to convert the ʻradically disaffectedʼ who asks ʻwhy
must I be moral?ʼ
Similar doubts and criticisms are raised by Ray-
mond Geuss. He rightly questions the underdescribed
relation between moral identity and practical identity
in these lectures. In his turn, Thomas Nagel claims
that oneʼs practical identity is the product of moral-
ity, not its source. Bernard Williams, whose Ethics
and the Limits of Philosophy is the subject of a
sympathetic discussion in the lecture on ʻReflective
Endorsementʼ, doubts whether ʻthe normative questionʼ
can be coherently asked such that it is ʻrationally
inescapableʼ about ʻultimate justificationʼ, ʻpractically
relevantʼ and ʻthe answer to which justifies by explain-
ingʼ (p. 213).
In an extended reply Korsgaard points out that her
picture of the pervasiveness of obligation as ʻsome-
thing we experience every morning when the alarm
goes offʼ (p. 255) is truer to life than one in which
moral obligation only occasionally intrudes to spoil
the fun. It is tempting to respond that only in so far
as we remain sane enough to set the alarm, connected
enough to stop when we are called, reflective enough
to question our codes, that obligations will weave their
net. Moral obligation surrounds us only after it has
made inroads into our selves. It is true that we cannot
escape obligation and keep ourselves intact. But is it
not my self that I sometimes want to escape?
All in all, this book offers a model of philosophy ʻin
actionʼ with a variety of protagonists, intricate story-
lines, compelling arguments, challenging criticisms
and ambitious reconciliations. It should be a spur to
think philosophically about the nature of our moral
obligations and their relation to our identities.
Meena Dhanda
Infinite variety
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks Volume 2, ed.
and trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg, Columbia University
Press, New York, 1996. xii + 736 pp., £40.00 hb,
0 231 10592 4.
The great project undertaken by Joseph Buttigieg of
Notre Dame University, aiming to make a translation
of Gramsciʼs complete prison notebooks available to
an Anglophone audience, has now reached the second
of five volumes planned.
A brief selection from the notebooks (written
between 1929 and 1935) was first published in English
in 1957, but it was the publication of Quintin Hoare
and Geoffrey Nowell Smithʼs Selections from the
Prison Notebooks in 1971 that was fundamental to
the diffusion of Gramscian notions in the English-
speaking world. Selections from Cultural Writings,
edited and translated by David Forgacs and Geoffrey
Nowell Smith, appeared in 1985, and in 1995 Derek
Boothmanʼs Further Selections from the Prison Note-
books filled in the gaps left by the earlier selections,
covering religion, education, economics, science, trans-
latability and Croceʼs philosophy. All these volumes
were published by Lawrence & Wishart.
In 1975 a complete critical edition of the notebooks,
edited by Valentino Gerratana, was published in Italy,
comprising all twenty-nine originals exactly as they
were written by Gramsci and including all the notes,
even though many were subsequently crossed out and
incorporated into later notes.
The translation of this edition is faithful throughout
and sensitively reflects Gramsciʼs style of writing. But
what is most remarkable is the notes supplied by the
editor. Joseph Buttigieg explains in detail every refer-
ence to an author, book, periodical or historical event.
These notes are much more extensive than those in the
Italian edition. As a result, the English-speaking reader
is provided with the finest possible background for a
full understanding of Gramsciʼs thought.
This second volume contains Notebooks 3, 4 and 5.
The first volume (1992), comprising Notebooks 1 and
2, also contained a valuable introduction by the editor.
Notebooks 3 and 5 are similar to 1 and 2 in that they
contain a miscellany of short notes on an astonishing
variety of topics. However, certain strands of Gramsciʼs
multi-directional inquiries stand out, such as those on
intellectuals, popular culture (mainly literature and
journalism), Italian history, Americanism, and the
Catholic Church (both as a religious institution and
a formidable political-ideological force). Other topics
include the Renaissance, the Reformation, language,
Chinese and Japanese culture.
Notebook 4 represents a significant phase in the
evolution of Gramsciʼs project because it contains
the first short essays in which he developed his ideas
on particular themes such as the nature of ideology,
the relation between structure and superstructure,
Machiavelli and other aspects of Marxist theory. (This
notebook also contains the set of notes outlining his
original contribution to the interpretation of Canto 10
of Danteʼs Inferno.) The short essays in Notebook 4
were all subsequently incorporated into longer essays
in later notebooks. When Joseph Buttigiegʼs labours
are complete, it will be possible to trace the evolution
of Gramsciʼs thought on any particular topic, such
as the role of intellectuals in society, the relation
between culture and politics, or the critique of positiv-
ism. Meanwhile, we have the first five notebooks and
these admirably illustrate the great range of Gramsciʼs
intellectual interests and his remarkable knowledge of
Italian history, literature, religion and language.
The notebooks also illustrate Gramsciʼs abiding
preoccupation with history and his deep concern that
Marxism should be purged of all residues of positiv-
ism, which he saw as the tendency to reduce Marxism
to laws similar to those of natural science. In his
view the people, through the development of a critical
awareness, should become the makers of history, rather
than be seen as unconscious actors in a mechanistic
Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 49
drama that unfolds according to immutable laws. As
he put it, when using the term ʻhistorical materialismʼ
one should remember ʻto put the accent on the first
term “historical” and not on the second which is of
metaphysical originʼ.
The fragmentary character of the notebooks has
often been the subject of comment and it is particularly
evident in these early documents, whereas some of the
later ones, beginning with number 10, are devoted to
particular themes. It is usually implied that this frag-
mentariness is a drawback forced on Gramsci by the
difficult conditions in which he worked; and that it is
an obstacle which the Gramscian scholar has to over-
come, seeking to extract the main concepts from the
many factual notes in which they are embedded. Joseph
Buttigieg suggests, however, that the fragmentary char-
acter of the notebooks is due, at least in part, to the
ʻphilologicalʼ method governing their composition.
(Gramsci studied linguistics at Turin university.) He
understood philology as a method of scholarship for
ascertaining particular facts in their unique ʻindividu-
alityʼ. Whereas the metaphysical impulse tends to
absorb the particular into the general, history as con-
ceived by Gramsci searches for ways to retrieve the
fragment, to ascertain its specificity, and dwell on its
difference. The complete text of the notebooks demon-
strates what he meant by placing the accent on history
ʻin its infinite variety and multiplicityʼ.
Accordingly, in interpreting Gramsciʼs concepts it is
always necessary to bear in mind the precise historical
circumstances in which they are embedded, for if these
are allowed to disappear the concepts are in danger of
becoming dogmas. As Stuart Hall has said, they can
be disinterred from these concrete circumstances and
transplanted to new soil, but this has to be done with
considerable care and patience.
Gramsci was not only responsible for what many
believe to be the most significant developments in the
Marxist theory of politics in the twentieth century.
The practice of philological criticism in his prison
notebooks also constitutes an important contribution
to the elaboration of an anti-dogmatic Marxism.
Roger Simon
My brother’s keeper
Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, trans. Michael B.
Smith, Athlone, London, 1996. xii + 191 pp., £45.00
hb., 0 485 11466 6.
50 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)
Levinasʼs philosophy offers a powerful critique of
the attitude of indifference to otherness, an indiffer-
ence most concisely – and archaically – expressed by
Cainʼs biblical question: am I my brotherʼs keeper?
This typifies Western metaphysics in its subordination
of ethics to epistemology and ontology. Levinas
recuperates the desire for the ineffable, what lies
ʻbeyond essenceʼ, what disturbs the fragile unity of
socialized beings, and the ʻeconomicʼ totality of col-
lective formations. With his prioritization of a ʻface-
to-faceʼ ethics over a metaphysics which reduces the
radical alterity of the other to a graspable and pliable
material for conceptualization, the Heideggerian
notion of ʻbeing-withʼ becomes transformed into a
ʻbeing-forʼ the other. The relation to the other is neither
symmetrical, nor reciprocal, for it has no ground and
ultimate justification but the infinite obligation and
responsibility of an I to a Thou, an I always undone,
displaced and reshaped by the other.
Proper Names, translated with utmost care and
acumen by Michael B. Smith, comprises two parts,
one entitled ʻProper Namesʼ and the other ʻOn Maurice
Blanchotʼ, which first appeared separately in France in
1976 and 1975 respectively. Many of the accompanying
short essays review the work, or commemorate the
death, of some of Levinasʼs predecessors and con-
temporary intellectuals whose thought he encounters
as an event, as singular and irreducible to ʻeconomicʼ
representation as the individuals who bore the cor-
responding proper names.
The opening essay is a commentary on Shmuel
Josef Agnonʼs poetry wherein Levinas studies the
enigmatic ontology of what is beyond signification, of
ethics, justice and the Holocaust, and the ʻreverberation
of beingʼ in Agnonʼs texts. In ʻMartin Buber and the
Theory of Knowledgeʼ, he examines the constellation
ʻlanguage, authentic life, and truthʼ in Buber, as well
as some of his most cherished ideas concerning the
I, the other, and their unthematizable encounter. The
critique of the philosophy of consciousness and the
subject–object model of thought received a decisive
impetus from Buberʼs profound explorations of the
I–Thou and the I–It relation. Levinasʼs objections to
Buberʼs theory – that ethics should not presuppose
symmetrical roles between the I and the Thou, and that
science should not hastily be relegated to the sphere
of the I–It – shed a revealing light both on his indebt-
edness to Buber and on his departure from Buberʼs
theory, his shift to an ethics ʻwholly otherwiseʼ.
In the same vein, ʻPaul Celan: From Being to the
Otherʼ affirms Celanʼs retrieval of an understanding
of poetry as a modality of the worldʼs openness to
thought, as a seeking of the other in the mysteries
of the I–Thou. Elsewhere in the book, Levinas chal-
lenges the idea that philosophy, by its very vocation, is
limited to the question of being (ʻJeanne Delhomme:
Penelope, or Modal Thoughtʼ). His insightful texts
on Kierkegaard further elaborate the relation between
thought and subjectivity. As opposed to immersing the
subject in the undifferentiated unity of the Hegelian
system, Levinas raises the Kierkegaardian positing of
the I as an entity resistant to generality. To the idea of
egotism as beingʼs ontology in Kierkegaard, Levinas
counterposes ʻdiaconyʼ as responsibility to the other.
The Western worldʼs obsessive attention to factic-
ity, the choice of a conception of language either as
disclosure or as ethical event, and the human face as
proof of the existence of God are some of the issues
Levinas unfolds with reference to Jean Lacroix, Roger
Laporte and Max Picard. In ʻThe Other in Proustʼ
he envisages the redemption of philosophy from the
identification (Parmenidean in origin) of being and
knowing. ʻFather Herman Leo Van Bredaʼ is a homage
to the scholar who organized the Husserl archive at
Louvain, and the final essay of the first part of the
Rolling the state back in
Mark Neocleous, Administering Civil Society: Towards a Theory of State Power, Macmillan and St Martinʼs
Press, London and New York, 1996, xii + 235 pp., £40.00 hb., 0 333 65854 X, 0 312 16155 7 (US).
Administering Civil Society offers a Marxist theory
of the state, based upon a fundamental rethinking of
the state–civil society distinction. Contrary to what
the author perceives as a recent trend within politi-
cal theory – a concentration on civil society – this
work contends that the concept makes sense, and its
use is legitimate, only if the concept of the state is
also in operation. Such a claim situates Neocleous in
opposition not only to those strands of Marxism that
have sought to treat the state as an epiphenomenon
of the economic base but also to theorists such as
Foucault who have abandoned the distinction in favour
of analyses of power within ʻthe socialʼ.
Neocleous seeks to reassert the mutual
indispensability of the twin concepts of the state
and civil society, and to demonstrate the constitu-
tive power of the state over civil society. This is
combined with the claim that the former is actively
fashioned through struggles within the latter, which
give rise to a multitude of administrative functions
designed to mediate and incorporate them within the
bourgeois state.
book focuses on Jean Wahlʼs way of drawing the
contrast between feelings and concept.
The section on Blanchot comprises four readings of
his texts. Insightful and sensitive, Levinasʼs interpre-
tation takes up Blanchotʼs dichotomy between the
categories of the Day, referring to law, power, social
role, order, and all human activity apart from art,
which is ranged under the categories of the Night.
Transcendence and immanence, ʻthe frightfulness of
the Neuterʼ (p. 154), the excluded middle, and the
scattered discourses of a writing irreducible to totality,
and the surplus of meaning that no world disclosure
can fully grasp constitute the main focal points of
these essays.
Both opponents and defenders of Levinasian ethics
will find this collection useful and accessible; and
those who are not familiar with his critique of meta-
physics and modernity will be impressed with the
incomparably seductive prose of a thinker who escapes
categorization, equidistant as he is from both Cartesian-
ism and post-structuralism, and scarcely representing
any other ʻ-ismʼ one might care to name.
Marianna Papastephanou
The rethinking of the distinction and the mediating
role of political administration is addressed in two
stages. The first critiques the theoretical roots of the
distinction within the Hegelian-Marxist tradition. Neo-
cleous traces its development from its point of origin in
Hegel, via its adoption by Marx, to its most elaborated
form in Gramsciʼs writings. This allows him to offer
a rich theoretical argument that engages critically
with Lenin, Althusser, Foucault, and a number of
contemporary left-wing writers.
Part two of the book illustrates the reconceptual-
ization using the example of the English working class
and its incorporation into the British body politic since
1832. As a method of constituting legal subjectivity,
fashioning the market, and subsuming the working
class, political administration is deemed to span the
borders between legislative and judicial functions. This
is a striking claim, for it means that modern industrial
capitalism was not simply perpetuated by state power,
but actively fashioned by it; and it was these same
instruments – political administration – that were used
to subsume working-class struggle.
Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 51
 Integral to this argument is the critique of such
notions as ʻsocial controlʼ and ʻlabour aristocracyʼ,
which have featured in standard accounts of the lack
of working-class revolution. The idea that a poten-
tially revolutionary proletariat was ʻcontrolledʼ by the
ruling class is criticized for lacking specificity (in the
explanatory and the historical sense), and as failing
to conform to a historical materialistic analysis. The
notion of a labour aristocracy (with its roots in Engels
and Lenin) also runs into problems of definition and
historical location. Indeed, it has been expanded to
such an extent that any part of the working class
that does not appear ʻnormalʼ can be sectioned off
and blamed for undermining a proletarian revolu-
tion. Neocleous maintains that the theories of social
control and labour aristocracy suffer from the same
dilemma – namely, while both rely upon the ideas of
struggle and the incorporation of the working class,
they have difficulty in accounting for working-class
struggle. Traditionally, the working class has been
labelled supine, and whilst it may appear that to be
incorporated the working class had to be a supine
NEWS
Anniversary blues
Social Emancipation: One Hundred and Fifty Years After The Communist Manifesto
17–20 February 1998, Centro Capitolio, Havana.
From Enlightenment to Dialectics: Dialectic of Enlightenment
26–28 February 1998, Columbia University/New School for Social Research/Goethe Institute, New York.
Anniversaries can be fraught affairs, as often melan-
choly as uplifting. Never more so than in Cuba today,
a socialist system tottering on the edge of extinction.
There was defiance in the very existence of the inter-
national conference on the one-hundred-and-fiftieth
anniversary of the Communist Manifesto in Havana
– defiance of the forces that would deny Cuba a future,
and also, thereby, of certain of the realities emerging
within Cuban society.
Located in the Capitolio building, a 1932 replica of
the Capital building in Washington, and coordinated
by the Institute of Philosophy, a division of the Cuban
Academy of Sciences, the conference was an official
(not merely an officially sanctioned) event. The combi-
nation of architectural grandeur and lack of basic
amenities (no running water), characteristic of Old
52 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)
body, the reverse is the case: the working class was
incorporated for the very reason that it was not. If it
had not been incorporated, then it would likely have
realized its revolutionary potential.
Neocleousʼs alternative reading of working-class
subsumption is based upon a multi-layered analysis
of the integrated parts of the development of the
working class. This begins by considering bourgeois
revolution and the development of citizenship, and is
then linked with the rise of trade unionism, the family,
the laws of contract, unemployment insurance, and the
development of the Poor Laws, the Reform Act, and
the workhouses.
This is a stimulating and insightful work, one that
benefits from tackling head-on, in a refreshing and
provocative manner, the issue of a Marxist theory of
the state. Part of its attraction is its originality, which
stems from its refusal to be drawn into giving merely
another exegesis of Marxʼs thoughts on the subject of
the state.
David Stevens
Havana, was powerfully symbolic of the state of Cuba
itself. As was the need for foreign currency, which
seems, increasingly, to provide the organizational
imperative behind even such politically significant
events.
Predictably, papers varied wildly in character,
quality and interest. Broadly speaking, there were
three main types of presentation: (1) recapitulations
of fixed positions, ritually presented as statements,
without embellishment or critical intent; (2) analyses
of the economic situation, both globally and in Cuba;
(3) more theoretically and politically diverse discus-
sions of different aspects of the text of the Manifesto.
Participants were split more or less equally between
Cubans and visitors, with three-quarters of the latter
(about thirty-five) English-language speakers, from
Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Turkey and the
USA.
The crippling orthodoxy of so many of the papers
– denunciation of dogmatism in the style of dogma-
tism; philosophy as solidarity with established ideas
– was offset, in part, by the insights they offered the
outsider into how the Cuban party intellectual estab-
lishment is functioning at this moment in the history
of socialism in Cuba. Conventions were far closer to
Eastern European state socialism than I for one had
imagined they would (or could) be – although the rep-
resentation of women, as organizers and participants,
was stronger. There was no reference to the history
of Marxism in Latin America; almost none to any
post-Stalinist Marxist traditions. The distinctiveness of
Cuban Marxism was marked solely by the invocation
of José Martì, whose name seems to function as a
nationalist place-holder for Castroʼs, generalizing the
class content of the Cuban stateʼs Soviet-style ideologi-
cal pronouncements, through mythic continuity with
its late-nineteenth-century past.
However, orthodoxy was no means the preserve
of the Cuban papers. US contributions included a
denunciation by Erwin Marquit of the French Com-
munist Partyʼs betrayal of the working class in its
1996 announcement modifying its conception of the
exclusively class character of the state (so hot off the
press, it was read directly from a laptop); and a surreal
piece of sophistical dialectics in which the collapse
of the Soviet Union was declared a disaster for, and
failure of, capitalism – because of the stability its
non-cyclical economy introduced into the world system
– backed up by a quotation from a broker at Merril
Lynch. Presumably, once China becomes a capitalist
society, the chips will really be down. One had the
feeling that even Hollywood (Red Corner, Tomorrow
Never Dies) is ahead of the game here.
More realistic North American contributions
included Andrew Parkerʼs Foucauldian ʻWhat is a
(Communist) Author?ʼ and Steve Crockerʼs Deleuzean
ʻThe Speed of Capitalʼ, both of which demonstrated
that there is interesting work to be done in re-engaging
Marxʼs texts with subsequent theoretical resources.
Disappointingly, Georges Labica (ex-Althusserian,
author of Marxism and the Status of Philosophy),
talking on the Manifesto itself, drifted off into con-
ventionalism, after a bright start.
The papers on globalization – ʻGlobalization, what
globalization?ʼ – were largely disappointing, though
there was an informative paper on the forthcom-
ing OECD Agreement on Mutual Investment, and a
lively piece from Stuart Rosewarne on ʻClass Struggle
Down-Underʼ, about the situation in Australia. It was
certainly refreshing to be at a conference at which
questions of international political economy were dis-
cussed alongside issues of temporality and authorship.
It reminded one of the inhibiting cultural effects of
the academicization of left intellectual life in Britain
over the last fifteen years
Wolfgang Haug spoke on the Manifestoʼs prioritiz-
ation of struggle over being. If, as he summarized his
reading, ʻthe contradictions are our hopeʼ, there will
be plenty of hope in Cuba for some time yet. Whether
there will be much else for the socialized sectors of
the economy to rely upon is another matter.
Siren songs
The fiftieth anniversary of Adorno and Horkheimerʼs
Dialectic of Enlightenment fell in 1997. Given its
history, it is perhaps fitting that the conference organ-
ized to celebrate it in New York should have failed
to make it on time. But this was not another case
of belated recognition. Far from it. Reluctance to
praise the text was palpable; ambivalence the vis-
ceral response. It was not hard to see why. For how
are followers of Habermas to celebrate Dialectic of
Enlightenment in the wake of their forced marriage
of its tradition to functionalist sociology and Rawlsian
political theory? This was a question which became
more weirdly fascinating as the event wore on.
The organizers were determined not to be boring.
Hostilities began with a talk by Richard Rorty. It was
a robust assault. Predictably provoked by the bookʼs
ʻanti-Americanismʼ into a show of philosophical and
political patriotism, he insisted that it contains ʻno
argumentsʼ, but only ʻa series of rantsʼ. He proceeded
to identify ʻfive false opinionsʼ it perpetrates, which
he claimed are now disseminated in the USA by
Foucauldians. (Yes, itʼs all the same out there, among
the theorists of modernity.) Thereafter, he used the
occasion to rehearse potted versions of his estab-
lished positions on pragmatism (ʻthe saving power
of US industrialismʼ) and the relationship between
philosophy and politics (ʻthere is noneʼ).
This was a vintage display of the anti-intellectu-
alism and cultural complacency, laced with disin-
genuous-ness, for which Rorty is justly renowned.
He seemed unaware that his two main claims – that
Nietzsche represents an extension and self-correction
of Enlightenment, and that aspects of Enlightenment
politics can be continued on that basis – were made
some time ago by the principal object of his derision,
Foucault; or that Nietzsche has a fairly central role
to play in Dialectic of Enlightenment itself. But this
Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 53
hardly mattered. Engagement with the text and its
ideas was not why he was there. Rather, having
opened up a gulf between the podium and the
book, he had set the stage for those who followed
to appear to be closing the gap, however distanced
their concerns from those of the book itself. This
had the whiff of genius. The rejections of the
book which ensued were thus able to dissemble
the continuation of its tradition, without a hint of
dialectic in their negation of its positions.
Both Axel Honneth and Albrecht Wellmer
gave papers of symptomatic significance in this
regard: Honneth in his defence of ʻworld-disclos-
ingʼ diagnoses of ʻsocial pathologiesʼ as a legiti-
mate practical-philosophical activity, alongside
theories of justice; Wellmer in his application of
the discourse-ethical conception of subjectivity to
a critique of Adorno and Horkheimerʼs reading
of the myth of Odysseus. In each instance, the
proximity to Dialectic of Enlightenment threw name of a non-regressive, reflective form of mimetic
harsh light on the state of the Habermasian problem- approximation. It was during the discussion that fol-
atic purporting to succeed it: methodologically in the lowed – six papers into the event – that the words
awkwardness of Honnethʼs idea of a world-disclosure ʻcommodityʼ and ʻreificationʼ were uttered, briefly,
which is neither ʻaestheticʼ nor concerned with truth, for the first time. (Dialectics went without a mention
yet is still somehow ʻexplanatoryʼ; more substantively throughout, despite the conference title.) The culture
in the idealism of Wellmerʼs conception of a subjec- industry was the only one of the bookʼs main themes
tivity formed without renunciation, and the lack of not to have a session devoted to it, although there were
tension in his corresponding conception of art, as just two on aesthetics.
one practice of freedom among others. The psychoanalytical dimension of the text was,
In its baroque accumulation of ad hoc modifications, predictably, more eagerly discussed. Joel Whitebrook
the degenerative state of the Habermasian research expressed disquiet about the ʻbad utopianism of a
programme was cruelly exposed. However, unlike de-differentiated subjectivityʼ in Adornoʼs critique of
their New York compatriots (content to keep playing sublimation, and pressed for a non-egoic conception,
the scratched record of New School political theory: along the lines of Castoriadisʼs work. Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek
ʻwhere are your universally discursively justified compared Horkheimerʼs with Lacanʼs reading of the
normative criteria?ʼ), Honneth and Wellmer each Kantianism of Sade. For Lacan, he insisted, rather
displayed intimations of the situation, in their inter- than exemplifying the moral law, Sade betrays the
mittent consciousness of the historical and existential- stringency of Kantian ethics. Kantʼs ethics are more
political thinness of their ʻbetter theoriesʼ. Yet neither Kafkaesque than Sadeian, since we cannot legitimately
appears ready to address the problem at its intellectual determine in advance the content of the duty we
source. are nonetheless commanded to perform. However, in
The most successful session was the one on anti- its identification of the pleasure we derive from our
Semitism. Anson Rabinbach argued for the central- defences against superegoic regulation, Z̆iz̆ek judged
ity of ʻElements of Anti-Semitismʼ to Dialectic of Dialectic of Enlightenment a ʻpresentimentʼ of an
Enlightenmentʼs argument about Enlightenment, and important phenomenon which is far more prevalent
highlighted the problematic anthropological universal- today. This was the strongest positive judgement of
ism of its address – the peculiar lack of specificity in the book offered over the three days. The closest
an analysis which was a direct response to news of the thing to an Adornian paper was given by a Derridean,
Alex Düttmann, who spoke about the constitutive role
situation in Germany in 1943. (There are ʻno Jewsʼ in
of exaggeration in thought. Which takes us back to
ʻElements of Anti-Semitismʼ.) Andreas Huyssen gave
our starting point. How do Habermasians celebrate
an enthralling reading of Art Spiegelmanʼs comic-book
Dialectic of Enlightenment? Tied firmly to the mast.
Maus, as a counter to the false polarizations of contem-
porary debates about representing the Holocaust, in the Peter Osborne

54 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)

LETTER

Critical social science and

psychological explanation
I would like to thank Andrew Collier for his interesting review (ʻMind, Reality and
Politicsʼ, RP 88, pp. 38–43) of my book Agency, Health and Social Survival (Taylor &
Francis, 1996). There is no space here to acknowledge all I have learnt from it, or to
address more than our most basic disagreement. In his book Critical Realism: An Intro-
duction to Roy Bhaskarʼs Philosophy (Verso, 1994), as in this review, Andrew sees social
mechanisms as constrained by human biological nature, but not by human psychology.
Similarly, in an earlier work, his ʻTree of Sciences and their Objectsʼ situates the ʻpsycho-
logical and semiological sciencesʼ at the top of a hierarchy of strata, each of which onto-
logically presupposes and is in some sense explained by the one below (Scientific Realism
and Socialist Thought, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, p. 45). I prefer a tree with branches,
so that the social and the psychological are on the same level. Both presuppose and emerge
from (and affect) human physiology and ecology. Human social relations and human
psychological nature presuppose, enable and constrain each other in a variety of ways.
Andrew agrees that ʻthe social, psychological and semiological levels all ontologically
presuppose each otherʼ but claims that attempts ʻto vertically explain social mechanisms in
terms of psychological ones … are all wildly implausibleʼ (Critical Realism, p. 133). My
position is not that human psychological nature explains social structures and processes,
but that it establishes the range of possibilities for these.
I mean by ʻpsychological human natureʼ, not vague descriptions such as ʻhumans are
competitiveʼ, but species-specific mechanisms and processes which, when realized, have
determinate effects in particular social contexts. As well as those investigated by cog-
nitive psychology, proposed mechanisms include ʻdeep structuresʼ of language acquisition,
unconscious desires, the capacity for empathy, and the vulnerability to certain sorts of
hurt which affect functioning. Social possibilities are realized through human action. They
depend on agentsʼ perceptual and cognitive capacities, motivation, emotions and under-
standing. The actual form these take depends on social context: it does not follow they can
take any form.
Some theorists dismiss the idea of psychological human nature altogether, as either too
basic to be interesting (the phenomenon of memory being, in that respect, rather like the
circulation of the blood) or as a mere reflection of the society in question, viewing motiva-
tions and emotions, for instance, as discursively constructed. With his interest in psycho-
analysis, and his realist understanding of it, Andrew cannot take this position. But what he
does has a similar effect in releasing the social from its moorings. He assumes that while
it is logically possible for psychological human nature to limit social possibilities (as with
the possible incompatibility between anarchism and a Hobbesian view of human beings),
in fact our psychic apparatuses are so flexible that they are compatible with any sort of
society. Indeed, he gives examples of social variability to prove his point. If societies as
diverse as these are compatible with psychological human nature, he is saying, an ecoso-
cialist world order is no less so.
I hope and believe Andrew is right to maintain this possibility exists. If so, this does
not mean that social structures are causally unaffected by psychological human nature, but
rather that our psychology is indeed so flexible that it is with historical causality that we
should be immediately concerned – the possibilities implicit in our starting point. Never-
theless we need to know about psychological mechanisms if, through collective human

Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998) 55

action, we are to move from this particular point in human history to a desired and safer
space. On the question of how to get there, Andrew tends to be over-rationalist. In the
book I identify the need to build movements with good internal relations as one of the
preconditions of change, and ask whether this is psychologically possible. Andrew doubts
whether this is a psychological matter. If Bolshevik organization failed in a particular
instance, he suggests, next time we could try a Menshevik style. In fact, bringing about
intended changes in organizations is not just a question of switching at will to another
model. It also seems that relationships between groups within movements are qualitatively
different from relationships between individuals. In the book I discuss Alfordʼs suggestion
that reparative groups are rare, and large ones even rarer. If true, this might explain the
common tendency to self-destructive splittism in social movements. If real psychological
mechanisms produce projective processes in which potential allies are seen as enemies,
analysts and activists need to understand these processes and their triggers to devise ways
of overcoming them.
Andrew rightly says that it is not individuals, but capitalist corporations, that destroy
the earth. It does not follow that the psychological mechanisms which might explain
individual spoiling are irrelevant. Psychological mechanisms are involved in our daily
acceptance of the destruction we live with, which our own routines prolong. Moral indif-
ference, ignorance, denial and collusive fantasies are produced and drawn on by corporate
decision-makers. The more we know about the psychological processes involved, the more
chance we have of bringing about social conditions that promote ʻalloplastic realismʼ.
Caroline New,
University of Bath

An opportunity to study
Modern European Philosophy at post-
graduate level in London, in a structured
programme.
One year full-time/
two years part-time, evenings.
Following a compulsory course on
Kantʼs Critique of Pure Reason, options
include: Adorno, Derrida, Gadamer,
Habermas, Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl,
Kierkegaard, Marx, Schopenhauer and
Wittgenstein.

Programme leaders:
MA Modern European
Peter Osborne, Jonathan Rée and
Philosophy
Alexander García Düttmann

Write to: Admissions Enquiries, Middle-

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sex University, Theory
White Hart Lane, London N17 8HR
Tel: 0181 362 5703
tmadmissions@mdx.ac.uk

MA Modern European Philosophy &

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are part of the Humanities MA Degree Scheme

56 Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998)