Critics of Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative action argue that he has failed to recognize the extent to which moral argumentation is grounded in particular historical contexts, cultural traditions, collective identities, or social lifeworlds. Although he has engaged in a series of strategies aimed at acknowledging the role of particularistic considerations without abandoning his primary commitment to ethical universalism, Habermas has not succeeded in meeting all of the objections of his critics. This paper treats the contradiction between formal and substantive (...) rationality, which lies at the heart of the debate, as an empirical phenomenon within the social world. It argues that the antinomy of formal and substantive rationality plays a central role in historical processes of social change. Through critical argumentation, social actors deliberate on contradictions among strategic, moral, and ethical standards of validity, and they struggle to resolve these contradictions through collective action and the reform of laws, policies, and institutions. Examples are drawn from US political history to substantiate the argument, and some questions are raised for further research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kenneth Burke, John Dewey, and the Pursuit of the PublicPaul StobIn Deliberation Day, Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin argue for the creation of a national holiday, "Deliberation Day," in which citizens come together over a two-day period in their local schools and community centers to deliberate over the merits of presidential candidates and their platforms (Ackerman and Fishkin 2004). While Ackerman and Fishkin propose that the government pay each (...) citizen a $150 stipend for voluntary participation, the purpose is not so much to monetarily to reward citizens for "showing up" as it is to foster an enriched civic culture that would send shockwaves through America's political infrastructure: "If Deliberation Day succeeded, everything else would change: the candidates, the media, the activists, the interest groups, the spin doctors, the advertisers, the pollsters, the fund raisers, the lobbyists, the political parties. All would have no choice but to adapt to a more attentive and informed public" (3). The task of Deliberation Day would be to create a new social context in which citizens could become enlightened through public participation. As the authors conclude the book, "We can, through an act of political imagination, create new institutions for redeeming the ancient promise of democratic citizenship. Ordinary men and women need not be the hapless playthings of the powerful. They can and must find new ways to hold their leaders to account, and redeem their dignity as human beings by responsibly shaping their collective destiny" (219).Ackerman and Fishkin's proposal is indeed filled with political imagination. I bring their proposal to light not to critique the possibilities and limitations of Deliberation Day, but to understand the way in which the authors understand "the public." At the bottom, what the polity needs, Ackerman and Fishkin believe, is a public space dedicated to the reinvigoration [End Page 226] of political culture. It is not that the citizenry is incapable of hammering out intelligent political solutions, but that it needs access to social contexts that facilitate deliberation and the emergence of a common good. To foster a culture of political intelligence, the public needs only the chance to enter the forums that will facilitate thorough, cooperative political decision-making.Ackerman and Fishkin are not alone in calling for access to or creation of these types of forums. Habermas's bourgeois public sphere—a public space in which citizens could come together and rationally debate the activities of the state—essentially represents the evolution of a context, a social space, a public arena (Habermas 1989). The bourgeois public sphere is meant to be egalitarian, providing citizens a forum in which to debate openly and foster a common political consciousness.1 But this sphere has proved problematic for a number of scholars. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge (1993), for example, propose a proletarian public sphere to counter capitalism's socioeconomic domination over public resources. Joan Landes (1988) argues that the bourgeois public sphere entails male domination in public life, to the exclusion of women. Nancy Fraser (1992) builds on the feminist critique by adopting the term "counterpublics," collectives of citizens—women, peasants, the working class, and other groups demarcated by issues of race, gender, and ethnicity—that arise in reaction to the dominant public sphere.2In the introduction to Counterpublics and the State (2001), Robert Asen and Daniel Brouwer argue that critiques of the bourgeois public sphere specifically and public sphere theory generally amount to three "reconfigurations" in the way in which scholars think of the public. First, scholars have come to recognize the existence and interaction of multiple public spheres. Second, they have come to acknowledge permeable boundaries of access to the multiple public spheres. Third, scholars have come to recognize the dynamic role of the state in shaping public discourse. One considerable result of these three reconfigurations is an increasing recognition of the political divisions that permeate society (Asen and Brouwer 2001, 17-25).If Asen and Brouwer are right, and I think they are, these three reconfigurations represent the general thrust of contemporary public sphere scholarship, including as it is understood among communication scholars.3 And however diverse such scholarship may be, a few common themes seem to recur across... (shrink)

Pandemic disruptions to schooling threw into sharper relief the entanglements of economy, gender norms, and education that had been there, and throughout the modern world, all along. The particular entanglement this paper aims to unravel is the reliance of education on a certain kind of attentiveness, historically provided by a feminized teaching force and mothers, that itself rests on the cultivation of particular sensibilities regarding time.

Inaugural lecture as Professor of Women's Studies in the Social Science Faculty at the University of Utrecht.

Not all those who write philosophy are recognized as philosophers. In this paper I argue that Dutch writer Isabelle de Charrière, usually known as a novelist, is actually engaged in doing moral philosophy. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Charrière wrote novels about characters who endorsed moral theories and commitments. Her novels track the dilemmas that these characters face in trying to live according their moral theories and commitments. I consider the case for treating fiction as philosophically valuable, (...) and argue that Charrière's novels fall into the category of philosophically valuable fiction. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhile there have been numerous critiques of the ideology of technology, it is useful to situate technology within both a liberal and a conspiratorial framework. The early work of Auguste Comte offers an ideal vehicle for this kind of analysis. Liberalism’s embrace of technology is developed in Comte to produce a theory of scientific and technical elites intent on reinventing society and the individual. This “technological conspiracy” reads very much like elements of a Silicon Valley manifesto describing the cyber-utopia of (...) a near tomorrow. For these reasons Comte is relevant to a discussion of conspiracy today. (shrink)

There are roughly two meanings attached to the concept of dignity: humanitas and dignitas. Humanitas refers to ethical and juridical notions of equality, autonomy and freedom. Much less understood is the meaning of dignitas, which this paper develops as peoples’ engagement with aesthetic values and genres, and hence with differences between people. Departing from a critical reading of Georgio Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’, I will analyze a case where aesthetics are quite literally at stake: women who lost their hair (...) due to cancer treatment. The analysis shows a complicated interplay between varying evaluations of female baldness by the self and others, mediated by (often strongly negative) cultural imaginaries, and aesthetic genres depicting conventional ways of ‘looking good’. The paper concludes by arguing for a reconnection of the two notions of dignity, and for a rehabilitation of aesthetics in daily life and care as fundamental values for organizing our societies. (shrink)

Given powerful globalizing processes under way, the topic of how to conceptualize the modern public sphere is becoming increasingly urgent. Amidst the array of alternatives, the efforts of Jürgen Habermas to attempt to balance out the two main conceptual requirements of this idea, a universalistic construction of the principle of shared interests and a sensitivity to the fact of modern pluralism, might seem a particularly promising option. In order to reconstruct the main motivations of, and to determine a set of (...) criteria of assessment for, Habermas's ongoing attempt to outline a theory of the public sphere adequate to the conditions of the present, the article turns first to a discussion of the seminal formulations of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. I suggest that the later writings are only partially successful in their attempt to redress some of the main conceptual difficulties that emerge in this early account. (shrink)

Vienna's scientific culture has long attracted historians' attention. Impressive though the scientific accomplishments of Viennese scientists were, and recognized by numerous Nobel prizes, they alone do not account for the historians' interest. Rather, Vienna's culture of science was imbedded in broader humanistic visions and invested in political and educational projects of major historical significance. Viennese philosophy placed humanity's hopes in science and articulated its historical ramifications to the public, drawing out the political implications of competing scientific methodologies and tying them (...) to dramatic historical events. This philosophy of science still reverberates nowadays in debates on liberty, markets, and government that quickly reveal their underpinning in the methodology of science. Vienna's scientific culture, it seems, has never ceased to capture the imagination, far beyond Austria. (shrink)

Taking its lead from analyses of gift exchange by Marcel Mauss and Marshall Sahlins as well as of contact by Charles Long and Jonathan Z Smith, this article elaborates a theory of the exchange, among dominant social subjects, of representations of their subjected proximate others in order to rectify the crisis precipitated by contact with otherness that threatens their claims to autonomy, authority, homogeneity, and universality. Specifically it situates the polemical exchange of representations of women among Friedrich Schlegel, G W (...) F Hegel, and Karl Gutzkow as exemplary German male bourgeois efforts to rectify the crises to subject formation generated, in part, by the emergence of gender-coded bifurcated bourgeois society and signaled by the Kantian and French Revolutions. The public dissemination of apotropaic representations screened the dependence upon proximate others by, and determined the positions among, exchange participants as well as maintained structures of domination. (shrink)

The history of market regulations provides an important perspective on the gendering of systems of food within the evolution of urban economies. This article addresses an important and distinctive period in this process, when New York shifted away from colonial and English-derived institutions in the first four decades of the nineteenth century. The legal status of women was unsettled during this time, introducing uncertainty into women's economic activities. New York City's public marketplaces were carefully regulated through a network of ancient (...) and sometimes arcane laws that inscribed particular activities within well-defined spaces while prohibiting them elsewhere. While these laws were derived from traditional English practices, enforcement was becoming increasingly legalistic rather than customary. While these market laws did not specifically invoke gender, they produced a system that was less navigable to women due to their problematic status as legal subjects. Because the system's navigability differed by commodity, these laws significantly shaped the gendered identity of foodstuffs, such as meat and fruit. Carefully delineating these legal constructions allows us to better understand how women navigated the real and conceptual spaces of the food system, and to see how the changing legal realities of New York impinged on women's employment. (shrink)

The article explores the textual construction of gender categories in the political discourse of Simón Bolívar by means of a close critical reading of his seminal writings made public between 1812 and 1820. The historical and political processes known as Latin American independence constitute a moment of radical transformation. It was during this period that the questions of political rights, nationality and citizenship were most open to debate throughout the continent. The article shows how the category woman is constructed ambiguously (...) in Independence/anti-colonial discourse, how gender is employed to create hierarchical systems of social organization to legitimate the exercise of power by an elite of white creole men and how myth is deployed in order to reinforce gender hegemonies. It will be shown that in Bolívar's writings colonial relations are recast as family relations and political independence from Spain legitimated in terms of sexual difference and masculine domination. (shrink)

Independence is a central and recurring theme in Wollstonecraft’s work. Independence should not be understood as an individualistic ideal that is in tension with the value of community but as an essential ingredient in successful and flourishing social relationships. I examine three aspects of this rich and complex concept that Wollstonecraft draws on as she develops her own notion of independence as a powerful feminist tool. First, independence is an egalitarian ideal that requires that all individuals, regardless of sex, are (...) protected to a comparable extent in all areas of social, political and economic life, no matter whether this is in the public or private sphere. Secondly, so long as this egalitarian condition is not compromised, independence allows for individuals to perform differentiated social roles, including along gendered lines. Finally, the on-going and collective input of both women and men is required to ensure that the conditions necessary for social independence are maintained. In Wollstonecraft’s hands, then, independence is a powerful ideal that allows her to argue that women must be able to act on their own terms as social and political equals, doing so as women whose perspectives and interests may differ from men’s. (shrink)

Independence is a central and recurring theme in Mary Wollstonecraft's work. Independence should not be understood as an individualistic ideal that is in tension with the value of community but as an essential ingredient in successful and flourishing social relationships. I examine three aspects of this rich and complex concept that Wollstonecraft draws on as she develops her own notion of independence as a powerful feminist tool. First, independence is an egalitarian ideal that requires that all individuals, regardless of sex, (...) be protected to a comparable extent in all areas of social, political, and economic life, no matter whether this is in the public or private sphere. Second, so long as this egalitarian condition is not compromised, independence allows for individuals to perform differentiated social roles, including along gendered lines. Finally, the ongoing and collective input of both women and men is required to ensure that the conditions necessary for social independence are maintained. In Wollstonecraft's hands, then, independence is a powerful ideal that allows her to argue that women must be able to act on their own terms as social and political equals, doing so as women whose perspectives and interests may differ from men's. (shrink)

This paper explores the gendering of civil society by focusing on the moral campaigns against wet nursing and in favour of maternal feeding in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, drawing attention to the overlap between the family and market society. It argues that the organization of sexual difference is central to the social world and to the idea of civil society in Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Men enjoyed the benefits of ethical incorporation into a rich version of civil (...) society and withheld worth from women's participation in the market. Women who immersed themselves in the world of exchange were stigmatized as mercenaries and freelance hustlers, so that they could not achieve ethical incorporation except as natural mothers in the nether world of the family. (shrink)

Beyond the reaches of scholarly debates about how to define and value civility properly, social actors across various institutional domains routinely demarcate civil from uncivil behavior. Yet this everyday classification process remains understudied and undertheorized, despite being widespread and having significant stakes for the individuals and groups involved. This article begins to fill this gap by developing the concept of civility contests—practical efforts to draw symbolic boundaries between civil and uncivil individuals, groups, or behaviors. Through a focus on the realm (...) of political protest in the United States, this article demonstrates that civility contests involve a wide range of political actors (including institutionalized power holders, opposing movements, and the media) who engage in this boundary-work in order to justify the control or (de)legitimation of protest. It then highlights patterned disparities in the outcomes of these contests, demonstrating that the likelihood of being marked as uncivil and the extent to which this prompts negative social sanction is shaped by one’s social position. Overall, the article seeks to stimulate and guide future empirical research on civility contests and to deepen theoretical understandings of the relationship between symbolic and social boundaries and the role of symbolic boundary-work in the reproduction of political inequality. (shrink)

La fraternidad, entendida en el sentido revolucionario que tuvo en la tríada francesa, es hoy un valor eclipsado, como pretendo mostrar. En este trabajo me interesa particularmente indagar las causas del olvido del valor político de la fraternidad en una buena parte del pensamiento político feminista contemporáneo, no exclusivamente anglosajón, olvido o rechazo incluso, que es un producto parcial del eclipse general del concepto–y especialmente del olvido del carácter emancipatorio de la tríada revolucionaria- pero que tiene también raíces propias, como (...) pretendo mostrar. (shrink)

Discussions focusing on the relation between city and sexuality are rare in social and cultural studies. In this article I argue that the modern city is inherently and inevitably sexualized, and that modern sexuality is largely an urban one. The characteristics of this sexuality are described and discussed in the light of urban life world theory (Simmel, Wirth, Kracauer, Benjamin etc.), sexual constructionist theory, feminist analyses, gay studies and pornography. The particular quality of `sexuality' in urban sexualization is identified along (...) Heideggerian lines as a fundamental ` Gestimmtheit' (`being tuned') of modern being-in-the-world, that is of being-in-the-city. In conclusion, some implications of the intimate relation between city and sexuality are discussed. Thus, theories of everyday life and life world, as well as prevailing idioms of modernist and postmodernist cultural critique, are problematized. Throughout the article, the style and methods of the exposition comment on the problematics concerning the representation of sexuality; and trends towards a `discoursification' of sexuality are criticized. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article I consider alternate but often complementary models for women’s republicanism from those discussed by Sandrine Bergès. In particular, I make use of Bergès’s insights about extending philosophical inquiry beyond traditional texts to analyse how militant political action was both informed by and informed the creation of philosophical texts, and consider the possibility of bringing direct action into the realm of philosophical investigation.

This article explains how the issue of inclusion is central to Habermas’s theory of democracy and how it is deeply rooted in his conception of a political public sphere. After recalling Habermas’s views on the public sphere, I present and discuss various objections raised by other critical theorists: Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth and Iris Marion Young. These criticisms insist on the paradoxically excluding effects of a conception of democracy that promotes civic participation in the public (...) debate. Negt, Kluge and Fraser develop a Marxist line of analysis that question who can participate in the public sphere. Honneth and Young criticize in various ways the excluding effect of argumentation: are unargumentative speeches excluded from the public debate? I show how Habermas’s model can provide some responses to these various objections by drawing inspiration from his treatment of the gap between religious and post-metaphysical world views. (shrink)

Writing around the time of the French Revolution, Condorcet was a very early advocate of women’s suffrage. To fully appreciate the importance and originality of his contribution to the cause of women’s political rights, it is necessary to situate his ideas within the broad context of revolutionary feminist activism in general, its goals, modes of expression, successes or failures, as well as the nature of the opposition it faced. Such contextualization confirms that Condorcet, whose affirmation of women’s voting rights was (...) grounded in the theory of natural rights, was the most articulate and consistent feminist voice during the Revolution. My analysis of the Convention’s decision to ban all women’s political clubs in the fall of 1793 also calls into question a common and influential assessment of the Revolution. In contrast to the anti-feminist arguments of the Montagnards who wielded power at the time, arguments predicated on a restrictive understanding of natural law, Condorcet’s earlier feminist reasoning based on natural rights, one of the central political concepts of the Enlightenment, casts doubt on the claim that the Revolution was inherently misogynist and that the bourgeois public sphere to which it gave rise was founded on the exclusion of women. (shrink)

In this article we propose to return to the notions of public and universality in the so-called Critical Theory, in order to rethink the relation between politics, affects and women. For these purposes, we will analyze the famous The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere of J. Habermas, the first systematization of the notion of public sphere, understood as the scope of rational and universal debate which excludes the private-affective. Later, we will focus on the criticism of this study made (...) by the feminist revisionism of the eighties. These authors found a connection between the theoretical exclusion of the affects and the political expulsion of women. We will see that Habermas’ own Theory of Communicative Action opens the possibility of thinking the rationality present in the expression of affections, desires and feelings. The main aim of this work is to start a tradition of reflections for a truly universal public sphere theory. (shrink)

In his work titled ‘Dance Curves: On the Dances of Palucca’, Wassily Kandisky translates two postures of the German Expressionist choreographer Gret Palucca from photographs into line drawings. The drawings are a study, but they are neither pictorial, nor straightforwardly representational. Staging an encounter between Dance Curves and Hannah Arendt’s investigation into thinking as both an interrupted and interruptive activity, this essay argues for a poetics of appearance as it is constituted by nonconforming acts of critique. Negotiating conflicts that shape (...) a politics of recognition for criticism which deliberately or implicitly refutes utility, I articulate a process of appearance of meaning with differential relation to modernist concerns for interpretation, dissenting from rationalist and objectivist traditions that have dominated theatre and performance criticism since the Enlightenment. What happens when I disavow the drawings from the images, remove them from the source? Perhaps in such a place, we might find critique as a process of deliberately mishandled translation, as an occupation of an idea shifted elsewhere, as a displacement of meaning. Appearance shapes itself around slippages of attention that depart from the work of performance. In this essay, I turn to how these slippages fold outwards from the encounter, to the political nexus between performance and its world. In Arendt, I locate a means through which forms of thinking rendered as criticism constitute a resistant poetics to normative modes of paying attention, operating beyond what Bojana Kunst calls ‘the ready-made possibilities of discourse’ under neoliberalism, that is, the ‘pre-established models of criticality and reflexivity’ to which art and artistic subjectivity often partake. (shrink)