In this article, I examine what the ethical and political implications of conceptualizing and practicing philosophy for/with children in the neoliberal debt economy are. Though P4wC cannot alone bring about any significant transformation of debt political-economic realities, it can play an important role in cultivating oppositional debt ethics and consciousness. The first half of this article situates P4wC within the current global debt economy. Here, I summarize the analyses made by critical theorists of the ways that debt impacts public institutions, (...) and shapes individual subjectivity. The second half of this article builds on Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of “counter-conduct.” For Foucault, counter-conduct is an ethical/political act of resistance against governmentality, one that makes possible alternative social relations and ways of being in the world. I argue in this section that P4wC should be conceptualized, and practiced, as form of counter-conduct that challenges power in the debt economy. Both the form of P4wC pedagogy, and the content that can be taken up in a collective manner in communities of inquiry, make P4wC a potential site for debt counter-conduct practices. Thought of as counter-conduct, P4wC is an educational practice with liberatory promise. I conclude this piece with brief ruminations on practicing P4wC in the time of COVID, and during the uprisings around the world against racial capitalism. It is suggested here that P4wC not only be practiced within formal education settings, but also in the social movements that are fighting to bring into being a world more just for all of us. En este artículo, examino cuáles son las implicaciones éticas y políticas de conceptualizar y practicar la filosofía para / con niños en la economía de la deuda neoliberal. Aunque P4wC no puede provocar por sí solo ninguna transformación significativa de las realidades político-económicas de la deuda, puede desempeñar un papel importante en el cultivo de una ética y una conciencia de la deuda opuestas. La primera mitad de este artículo sitúa a P4wC dentro de la economía de deuda global actual. Aquí, resumo los análisis realizados por teóricos críticos sobre las formas en que la deuda afecta a las instituciones públicas y configura la subjetividad individual. La segunda mitad de este artículo se basa en la conceptualización de la "contra-conducta" de Michel Foucault. Para Foucault, la contra-conducta es un acto ético / político de resistencia contra la gobernamentalidad, que posibilita relaciones sociales y formas de estar en el mundo alternativas. Sostengo en esta sección que P4wC debe conceptualizarse y practicarse como una forma de contra-conducta que desafía el poder en la economía de la deuda. Tanto la forma pedagógica de P4wC, como su contenido adoptados de manera colectiva en las comunidades de investigación, hacen de P4wC un sitio potencial para las prácticas de contra-conducta de la deuda. Pensada como una contra-conducta, P4wC es una práctica educativa con promesa liberadora. Concluyo este artículo con breves reflexiones sobre la práctica de P4wC en la época de COVID y de los alzamientos en todo el mundo contra el capitalismo racial. Aquí se sugiere que P4wC no solo se practique dentro de los entornos de educación formal, sino también en los movimientos sociales que luchan por crear un mundo más justo para todos nosotros. Key Words: Debt, Philosophy for/with Children, Counter-Conduct. (shrink)

Central banks have accumulated unparalleled power over the conduct of macroeconomic policy. Key for this development was the articulation and differentiation of monetary policy as a distinct policy domain. While political economists emphasize the foundational institutional changes that enabled this development, recent performativity-studies focus on central bankers’ invention of expectation management techniques. In line with a few other works, this article aims to bring these two aspects together. The key argument is that, over the last few decades, central banks have (...) identified different strategies to assume authority over “expectational politics” and reinforced dominant institutional forces within them. I introduce a comparative scheme to distinguish two different expectational governance regimes. My own empirical investigation focuses on a monetarist regime that emerged from corporatist contexts, where central banks enjoyed “embedded autonomy” and where commercial banks maintained conservative reserve management routines. I further argue that innovations towards inflation targeting took place in countries with non-existent or disintegrating corporatist structures and where central banks turned to finance to establish a different version of expectation coordination. A widespread adoption of this “financialized” expectational governance has been made possible by broader processes of institutional convergence that were supported by central bankers themselves. (shrink)

Money markets are at the heart of financialized capitalism, as those markets that provide the funding liquidity needed for credit creation and leveraged trading. How have these markets evolved, grown, and become critical for larger financial flows? To answer this question, I distinguish an early period of financial globalization marked by regulatory arbitrage, offshoring, deregulation, and informal trading practices from a period of regime-consolidation marked by formal institutionalization. Concentrating on repo markets as the key funding sources for market-based banking, I (...) demonstrate that new institutional arrangements for these markets were initiated by private sector associations, but supported and authorized by public authorities. Bond trader groups codified new contractual arrangements and these were validated via reforms of bankruptcy codes and changes in central banks’ policy frameworks in the United States and European Union. Through these modifications and re-articulations in institutional conditions, transactions and large exposures on money markets became routine affairs—for shadow banking actors like money market funds as well as for commercial banks. The article concludes by discussing the continuity of regime-consolidation efforts after the transatlantic financial crisis and hypothesizes that they reveal “neo-patrimonial” features. (shrink)

Numerous scholars in the social sciences and humanities have speedily analysed and interpreted the COVID-19-induced social and political crisis. While the commitment to address an urgent topic is to be appreciated, this article suggests that the combination of confidence in the applicability of one’s tools and belief in the certainty of the available knowledge can be counter-productive in the face of a phenomenon that in significant respects is unprecedented. Starting out from the plurality of forms of knowledge that are mobilized (...) to analyse COVID-19 and its consequences as well as the lack of any clearly hegemonic knowledge, the article tries to understand how a limited convergence in the politico-medical responses to the crisis emerged, and speculates on what would have happened if this had not been the case. In conclusion, it is argued that this pandemic demands a greater awareness of the uncertainty of our knowledge and of the consequences of our actions, both in terms of being situated in time and of aiming at timeliness. (shrink)

In keeping with the radical openness of his theory of democracy, Habermas avoided pre-determining the ideal mode of economic organization for his favoured model of deliberative democracy. Instead of attempting a full-blown derivation, in this article, I propose adapting the Rawlsian method of comparing different political–economic regimes as candidate applications of his theory of justice to Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy. Although both theorists are seen as endorsing liberal democratic world views, from the perspective of political economy, the corollary of (...) their conceptions of democracy would arguably veer elsewhere: in Rawls’s case, into the territory of property-owning democracy or democratic socialism, and in Habermas’s, into any political–economic regime which guarantees the real exercise of full political and discursive liberties against the background of legitimate lawmaking. The ultimate aim of this article is to discuss whether a concrete conception of democratic socialism, if any, is compatible with Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy. (shrink)

In lieu of Abstract: With inequality of various sorts ballooning worldwide, a critique of democracy has come of age, and a change of political ethos is underway. Against this background, the critique of democracy becomes not only possible but also popular, and examples in China and many Western democracies abound. It is no exaggeration to say, in this context, that sufficient momentum has gathered to qualify the situation as "democratic recession," despite people may have different understandings as to the exact (...) nature of this recession and how long it will last. Accompanying this recession, Confucian political meritocracy, whose aim is to correct the wrongs of democracy, is constructed as an alternative to liberal democracy. Many argue that the end of history is not nigh but will continue in and by Confucian political meritocracy... (shrink)

Scholars of political thought often view Plato as a ‘political moralist’, or a ‘utopian’ partly due to the Republic’s emphasis on ‘justice’. But in the Republic, Plato offers a distinctive theory of legitimacy, one that grounds legitimacy on an interdependent relationship between justice and moderation. Justice requires that the principle of specialisation be respected, while moderation requires that citizens agree about who should rule. But citizens will only agree if their ‘necessary’ desires are satisfied. Conversely, the ‘necessary’ desires can only (...) be satisfied when the principle of specialisation is maintained. In this way, justice requires moderation, and moderation requires justice, and both are necessary for legitimacy. Plato’s theory of legitimacy is positioned in relation to existing accounts, especially those of John Rawls and Bernard Williams. It is shown that Plato’s theory is a genuine theory of legitimacy, not a theory of acquiescence. In the concluding section, Rawls’ theory is subjected to a critique based on Plato’s theory. (shrink)

Recently, many comparativists and democratic theorists have argued that democracy is in imminent peril, even in countries that are thought to be its strongholds. But theorists like Andrew Gamble, Wolfgang Streeck, and David Runciman suggest that some democracies are too embedded to collapse. Instead, they argue these democracies are experiencing long-term structural crises. This article explains how this alternative kind of crisis works. It conceives of legitimacy crises as ‘chronic crises’ in which democratic procedures are contested even as the democratic (...) political system is affirmed. In these crises, democracies are threatened by distortion and deadlock rather than death. The article gives a precise account of chronic legitimacy crises. It treats legitimacy as a scalar concept, going beyond binary views where legitimacy is something a state either has or lacks. It distinguishes periods of chronic crisis from stable periods and from acute crises. It shows how chronic crises are distinctively about legitimacy. It carves out conceptual space for a different kind of legitimacy crisis, and it assists comparativists in thinking about how younger democracies differ from older ones. (shrink)

This article explores the question of how to understand social media following the Habermasian theory of the structural transformation of the public sphere. We argue for a return to political-economic fundamentals as the basis for analysing the public sphere and seek to establish a characteristic connection between digital-behavioural control and singularised audiences in the context of proprietary markets. In the digital constellation, it is less a matter of immobilising the citizen as a consumer but rather of their political activation – (...) albeit in conditions under which commercial interests have primacy: privatisation without privatism. (shrink)

This article recounts the backlash against the neoliberal constitutionalism that locked in free trade and capital rights through the multilateral treaty organizations of the 1990s. It argues that we can find important forces in the disruption of the status quo among the elite losers of the 1990s settlement. Undercut by competition from China, the US steel industry, in particular, became a vocal opponent of unconditional free trade and a red thread linking all of Trump’s primary advisers on matters of trade. (...) Steel lobbyists themselves helped frame a critique of actually existing neoliberal globalism, which Trump both adopted and acted on as part of his trade war. By searching for the contemporary attack on neoliberal constitutionalism among the disgruntled corporate elite, we find that our current crisis must be framed as a backlash from above as well as one from below. (shrink)

There is an extensive body of literature detailing the forces behind and experiences of alienation in a modern capitalist world. However, social scientific interest in alienation had become parochial and balkanized by the 1970s. To reconstruct a unifying theory of alienation that addresses general features of capitalism, such as compulsory growth and commodification, and particular phases like financialized capitalism, we begin with the notion of futurelessness. Futurelessness refers to a deficient relationship to the future in which people’s senses of possibility (...) ossify, narrow, or dissipate. It may result from inclusion in and exclusion from capitalist mechanisms or processes. Moreover, processes of inclusion and exclusion may appear more voluntary or involuntary. With these general terms, we identify four manifestations of futurelessness in financial capitalism: commercial exhaustion, imaginative marginalization, therapeutic nowism, and pragmatic denialism. The conclusion addresses future-sustenance in an alienating world and the prospects of a more systemic and synthetic approach to alienation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe arrangements characteristic of systems of networked governance are likely to generate conspiracy theories because they rely on informal rather than formal structures of power. A formal hierarchy may be resented, but it is understood by those affected by it; in network systems, by contrast, it is often hard to determine who is in charge, even though such systems can heavily influence or even determine important social outcomes. While conspiracy theories may be motivated by many factors, in a world in (...) which informal norms and the decisions of networked elites play a large role, we should expect to see a continued and increasing preoccupation with alleged conspiracies. Some allegations of conspiracy may even function as cognitive shortcuts—“as-if” conspiracies—which apply a cui bono style of reasoning to make sense of otherwise opaque modes of social control. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 10, Page 1480-1493, December 2022. By applying the concept of democracy and the state proposed by Richard Rorty, the article aims to make a theoretical contribution to understanding frames of political mobilization and solidarity. While Rorty’s conceptual instruments stem from the field of epistemology and moral philosophy and have, so far, not been widely applied to theorizing statehood in general and labour market policy in particular, his ideas can help to understand leftist politics (...) between inter- and re-nationalization. By drawing on empirical findings on debates and negotiations between European trade union organizations, the text proposes an idea on how to overcome a dualistic framework beyond a footloose cosmopolitanism and national protectionism. (shrink)

The political public sphere is important for democracy, and it is changing – this is how the quintessence of Jürgen Habermas’s monumental study on The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989) could be summarized in simple words. In the fields of political sociology and social theory, history, but also research on social movements, cultural studies, and media and communication studies, his conception of the public sphere as a sphere mediating between the state and civil society has had a decisive (...) influence on the debate about the potential of collective reason for modern democracy. In this introduction we give a short overview of Habermas’s arguments on the rise and fall of the bourgeois public sphere, demonstrate the necessary link between the public sphere and democracy and, referring to the contributions to this special issue, sketch current transformations of the public sphere along three basic processes – digitalization, commodification, and globalization. (shrink)

There is a revival of notions of leader democracy and plebiscitary leader democracy both at the level of politics and in academic debate. This paper focuses largely on the latter, with occasional reference to real-world political developments. The paper sketches changes in the nature of contemporary governance; argues that Weber’s and Schumpeter’s account of leader democracy LD) as a means of addressing the crisis of representation has marked affinities with current debates; discusses the possible implications of the re-emergence of a (...) political language of LD. The paper takes a sceptical view, arguing that an appeal to leadership is a symptom of, and contributor towards, the problems it purports to address. Two contemporary defences of LD are discussed: that of the political scientist András Körösényi and that of the political theorist Jeffery Green. (shrink)

Contemporary ‘crisis studies’ seek to advance democracy by emphasizing the threats that technocracy and populism pose to a specific form of it, liberal- democracy. Crisis studies argue that, since the 1970s, technocratic policymak- ing has deepened economic inequality. This has fostered citizenly anger, which populists exploit. Four well-known iterations of this argument are evaluated using a political realist lens. Political realism emphasizes the histor- ical context of politics, actors’ possible motives, and a normative orientation derived from the political order itself, (...) rather than an external ethico-moral ideal. The realist lens encourages comparison of crisis studies with historical political theory, which situates liberal-democracy within the long-term devel- opment of oligarchic systems of authority, and political history, which portrays technocracy as a product of the well-funded reaction to assertions of the democratic impulse that began in the 1970s. Populism is in this view not so much a perversion of liberal-democracy as it is a perhaps unintended conse- quence of anti-democratic reaction. The crisis studies make this error because based on a moral defence of the justice of the liberal-democratic order. Revealing the democratically unhelpful moralism at the core of crisis studies demonstrates the usefulness of political realism as a form of applied political theory, and not simply theory about theory. (shrink)

Tucked into Wolfgang Streeck’s influential crisis theory of contemporary capitalism are various attempts at causally linking processes of neoliberalisation to generalised depoliticisation, while depoliticisation is in its turn attributed to the emergence of a diffuse ‘consumerist’ ethos in the 1970s. Streeck argues that rising consumerism led to a generalised demotic embrace of marketised forms of need satisfaction and in so doing evacuated the political will to resist neoliberal reforms. If, however, we take neoliberalisation to entail both the depoliticisation of the (...) demos and the marketisation of the polity, then Streeck’s attempt to connect these processes to consumption is weakened by significant historical oversights on both ends. Streeck’s attribution of depoliticisation to a new consumerist ethos is beset by a reductive economism. At the same time, Streeck overlooks just how pivotal legitimatory ideals of consumer-side social order developed by specific networked elites have been for the marketisation of the polity. (shrink)

There is limited evidence that socially responsible investment (SRI) strategies can resolve persistent concerns brought up in scholarship on the industry, particularly as it relates to considerations of justice. It is critical that SRI initiatives be interrogated about their broader impacts on environmental inequality and justice in the context of global power relations. Drawing upon environmental justice (EJ) theory, we propose a framework for transformative investment to halt the exploitation of humans and environment in pursuit of profit. We posit that (...) transformative investment initiatives, including those related to strategies of screening and shareholder resolutions, would reflect three general conditions of environmental justice. They would require (1) cumulative responsibility that focuses on holistic gains so that investment initiatives do not replace one harm with another; (2) embedded accountability that is rooted in the decision-making and concerns of directly impacted communities; and (3) counter-hegemonic practices that are integrated with broader strategies and movements that challenge structures of oppression and exploitation. Through these principles, we address problems with SRI that have already been identified in scholarship on the subject. Moreover, we draw upon Antonio Gramsci’s concept of ‘strategic power’ to conceptualize the conditions and actions necessary for transformative investment to take root. (shrink)

Is realism in political theory compatible with utopianism? This article shows that it is, by reconstructing a highly restrictive realist approach to political theory for guiding legislation and public policy, drawn from the work of Adam Smith, and showing how it can accommodate Piketty’s utopian proposal for a global tax on capital. This shows not only that realism and utopianism are compatible; but how realist and utopian political theory can be carried out in concrete cases. This moves debates to more (...) interesting questions of which forms of utopianism are permissible within which forms of realism; contributes to moving the contemporary realism debates from a Methodenstreit to questions of how it can and ought to be done; and contributes to an important contemporary debate about the permissibility of utopian proposals for political and economic reform in general and Piketty’s proposed global tax on capital in particular. (shrink)

In this special issue, we draw on pragmatist political and social theory and philosophy to illustrate the creative potential of this intellectual tradition for thinking about the numerous crises that haunt liberal democratic societies today. The introduction identifies five overlapping problem constellations (demise of public power, lasting consequences of inequality, pluralization of society, return of authoritarian practices and globalization of the world) that have driven the recent rise of undemocratic or authoritarian patterns of social organization and political rule. Against this (...) backdrop, we conclude that the revitalization of certain dimensions of liberal democracy will not suffice to overcome these problems, which means that democratic practices need radical rethinking and reconceptualization. For this intellectual and political endeavour, we argue, pragmatism provides a suitable framework to identify problems that require resolution and define and mobilize collective problem solving capacities from already existing practices. All eight contributions to this special issue draw on pragmatist political and social theory and philosophy to illustrate to what extent, and to what ends, this intellectual tradition can revitalize the political and social discourse on the past, present and future of democracy. The articles are organized in two sections : (1) Pragmatist critique and the critical potential of pragmatism, (2) pragmatist politics and theories of democratic practice. (shrink)

The idea of predistribution has the potential to offer a valuable and distinctive approach to political philosophers, political scientists, and economists, in thinking about social justice and the creation of more egalitarian economies. It is also an idea that has drawn the interest of politicians of the left and centre-left, promising an alternative to traditional forms of social democracy. But the idea of predistribution is not well understood, and stands in need of elucidation. This article explores ways of drawing the (...) conceptual and normative distinction between predistribution and redistribution, examining those general categories when considering the roles of public services and fiscal transfers, and looking at the ways in which government policies can empower and disempower different individuals and groups within the economy. This article argues that the most initially plausible and common-sensical ways of drawing the distinction between predistributive and redistributive public policies collapse when put under analytical pressure. It concludes that the distinction between predistribution and redistribution is best seen in terms of the aims or effects of policies rather than a deeper division of policy types, and argues that, once seen in those terms, predistribution is a central concern of social justice. (shrink)

Few have treated the critical literature on neoliberalism as an object of study in its own right. Those that have question the literature’s partisanship, theoretical coherence, and explanatory power, denouncing it as a thinly veiled form of leftist politics. Rather than leave the matter there, I pick up the thread and ask the following: if the critical theorization of neoliberalism is a leftist pursuit, what does it do for the left? How does the critique of neoliberalism affect the left’s self-understanding, (...) coherence, direction, and future? In this article, I argue that the critique of neoliberalism defines today’s political left via the negation of its neoliberal Other, is the ideological–discursive means by which the left articulates its diverse constituencies, and builds theoretical resources necessary for the left to go beyond marriages of convenience and achieve unity. Regarding the latter, the literature augurs a left battling for the subjectivity of popular actors, with solidarity, social freedom, and democracy as both the weapons and the stakes. I conclude the article by reflecting on what often goes missing in the literature – namely, Kapitalkritik and socialism – and the significance of these omissions for the left in light of the arguments above. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 3, Page 375-392, September 2022.

This article develops a line of theorising the relationship between peace, war and commerce and does so via conceptualising global juridical relations as a site of contestation over questions of economic and social justice. By sketching aspects of a historical interaction between capitalist accumulation, natural rights and state hegemony, the article offers a critical account of the limits of liberal international law, and attempts to recover some ground for thinking about the emancipatory potential of international law more generally.

Jan-Werner Müller’s analysis of ‘authoritarian populism’ represents a highly limited approach to the issue that is typical of many mainstream approaches within populism studies and liberal-democratic constitutional theory. Through a critique of Müller, the article develops an account of the historical emergence of authoritarian populism as a ‘long counter-revolution of the radical right’ against the values and institutions of the social-democratic welfare state. Focussing on the USA and UK, the article shows how, rather than being a novel phenomenon emerging from (...) the fringes in the 1980s and 1990s, authoritarian populism emerges from the middle of the twentieth century as a highly successful form of hegemonic struggle over the Republican and Conservative parties and over American and British societies. The political success of a highly contradictory ideological framework of the radical right has helped to largely normalise a language, rhetoric and imaginary of authoritarian populism and place it at the centre of contemporary politics and culture. By largely ignoring such a development, and the highly contingent nature of North Atlantic ‘democracy’, theorists and commentators like Müller fail to grasp the depth of the current authoritarian populist threat and offer only liberal-democratic mythology in response to the ranting and chanting of ‘fake news’. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 26, Issue 3, Page 384-390, September 2019.

Contemporary egalitarian political philosophy has become increasingly interested in the ways the international order may protect or undermine states’ capacities to deliver domestic egalitarianism. This paper draws on Miriam Ronzoni’s helpful discussion of the various different ways in which both philosophical and practical commitments can move beyond a contrast between a world of closed societies and a cosmopolis to explore how successful the theorizing prompted by that interest has been. Problems scholars like Peter Mair and Wolfgang Streeck have suggested the (...) EU faces also suggest that there are difficulties views like Ronzoni’s have to overcome to usefully orient us towards the threats posed by the interactions between domestic and international politics. These problems can be usefully framed by what the intellectual historian István Hont called jealousy of trade and used to understand debates between members of what is commonly understood as the republican tradition, especially in the eighteenth century. Jealousy of trade revolves around the way that international economic competition intensifies international political competition, requiring the restructuring of domestic politics to ensure the survival of the state, which then further intensifies international economic competition. The ways of navigating and controlling the increasing costs of an increasingly belligerent international order eighteenth century political theorists found help illustrate the challenges contemporary internationalising egalitarians face. Isaac Nakhimovsky’s work on Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s closed commercial state is, I argue, specially useful given the similarity of some of Fichte’s commitments to those of contemporary internationalising egalitarians. (shrink)

Neo-liberalism is not working but carries on regardless. A society and all of its institutions modelled on market logics and imperatives has produced system crisis and has lost widespread popular support. To account for neo-liberalism’s continuing grip, we must submit this project to ideology critique. Max Horkheimer offers some relevant insights into what this requires. Ideology critique needs to come up with a competing measure of progress, it has to demonstrate why this ought to be the standard and it needs (...) to expose the means by which this alternative is blocked. This article suggests that the normativity that underpins a social democratic project is best placed to prosecute these key tasks in a neo-liberal and historicizing age. It draws upon two major accounts of the ideological battlefield that has been staked out between neo-liberal and social democratic projects, looking to Wolfgang Streeck and Michel Foucault to identify the cultural resources that are available to, and the blocking strategies that have to be negotiated by, ideology critique in neo-liberal times. Finally it, turns to György Markus’s fine-grained and critical reading of the tasks of ideology critique outlined by Karl Marx. This section puts ideology critique into dialogue with a social democratic normativity in order to better consider the traction of ideology critique in a neo-liberal age. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 34-47, March 2022.

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 34-47, March 2022.

In this essay I introduce Pierre Rosanvallon’s recent turn toward relational egalitarianism. Rosanvallon has come to find in relational equality the best remedy for liberal democracy’s crisis and thereby joins a number of egalitarian thinkers who prioritize social and political relations over material distribution in their accounts of equality. Rosanvallon stands out for his historic-genealogical engagement with equality. Unlike other egalitarians, Rosanvallon is also a theorist of democratic legitimacy and governance, which invites a broader contextualization of his egalitarianism. My aim (...) in this essay is to provide such contextualization and to further discuss how elements of earlier works prepared a turn to relational equality bound up with increasingly global political theorizing. Inspired by Tocqueville and Marx, Rosanvallon regards democratic socialism as the normatively preferable regime type for relational equality. As I try to show, his political ambitions for democratic socialism run into a number of problems, mainly due to a schizophrenic relationship to the notion of class and his remarks on the relationship between democracy and capitalism. (shrink)

This paper discusses global reserve currencies from the perspective of structural global justice. Drawing on notions of structural justice and background justice, it suggests that the structures of global finance, by creating positions of privilege and disadvantage, can lead to injustices both with regard to distributive outcomes and with regard to domination. While the role of the dollar and Euro as global reserve currencies are not the only factors that contribute to these structural injustices, they need to be taken into (...) account to fully grasp the dynamics of global finance. They also have an impact on other mechanisms, such as sovereign debt, capital flows, and the governance of international financial institutions. The paper’s arguments support the claim that one cannot conceptualize global justice as justice between independent states. Rather, the global monetary regime constitutes a case of “background injustice” (Ronzoni 2009). (shrink)

I present the contours of an explanatory model of legitimacy that directs the focus away from normative questions and onto specific mechanisms of reality construction at play in constituting social orders. The key assumption informing the model is that stable orders rely fundamentally on their capacities to construct separate spheres of social reality, by which they exempt critical parts of reality from the burden of legitimation. I argue that an order's legitimacy ultimately depends on its ability to confine the question (...) of legitimacy by relegating authorship of reality to opaque sources that are separated epistemically from the institutional order. The effective reification of critical zones of reality is shown to be a functional precondition for institutional stability. I show that capitalist democracy, in particular, depends on this mode of constructing ‘passive legitimacy’, which constitutes a key obstacle for any attempt to transform it towards an ecologically and socially sustainable formation. (shrink)

This article examines the political crisis of social-democratic parties in Western Europe in light of its impact on the social-democratic emancipatory project, and asks whether the first calls the second into question. It begins by defining social democracy as an emancipatory project, and identifies three major historical phases that correspond to three distinct conceptions of the project. “Social-democratic dilemmas” section examines recent literature in comparative welfare state economics, political sociology, and studies of populism and authoritarianism, to show how the socio-economic (...) transformations of the last five decades have enlarged and fragmented the constituency of social-democratic parties, and contends that this situation has generated powerful tensions between the normative and the mundane dimensions of the social-democratic project. Three major dilemmas—economic, cultural, and political—leading to three deep conflicts internal to the social-democratic constituency are identified and discussed. Combining these empirical findings with the three rival interpretations of the social-democratic project introduced in “Social democracy as an ideational and a mundane project” section, “Three scenarios” section develops three possible scenarios for the evolution of this project in the near future: decline, drift, and renewal. “Implications for policy and politics” section assesses the likelihood and political meaning of each scenario for the pursuit of the social-democratic project, taking into consideration the recent upsurge of left-wing populism. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

My article provides a systematic interpretation of the transformation of capitalist society in the neo-liberal era as a form of what Karl Polanyi called ‘cultural catastrophe’. I substantiate this claim by drawing upon Erich Fromm’s theory of social character. Fromm’s notion of social character, I argue, offers a plausible, psychodynamic explanation of the processes of social change and the eventual class composition of neo-liberal society. I argue, further, that Fromm allows us to understand the psychosocial basis of the process that (...) Polanyi calls cultural catastrophe. This requires an elucidation of the major social forces of financialization and emancipation which, I argue, proved to be important formative factors in the emergence of neo-liberal society. The cultural catastrophe of neo-liberalism concerns the working class, whose prevailing social character has become misaligned with the new expectations and requirements of neo-liberal society. (shrink)