In his book Das Recht der Freiheit, Axel Honneth develops a theory of social justice that incorporates negative, reflexive and social forms of freedom as well as the institutional conditions necessary for their reproduction. This account enables the identification of social pathologies or systemic normative deficits that frustrate individual efforts to relate their actions reflexively to a normative order and inhibits their ability to recognize the freedom of others as a condition of their own. In this article I utilize Honneth’s (...) theory in the diagnosis of a contemporary social pathology, which impedes social recognition and thereby contributes to social injustice. I argue that this particular social pathology – associated with the Second Amendment right to bear arms – has given rise to a pernicious form of subjectivity, which I call self-defensive. I conclude with some remarks concerning what this application reveals about the strengths and weaknesses of Honneth’s account. (shrink)

There has been a persistent misunderstanding of the nature of cosmopolitanism in Immanuel Kant’s 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace,” viewing it as a qualitative break from the bellicose natural law tradition preceding it. This misunderstanding is in part due to Kant’s explicitly critical comments about colonialism as well as his attempt to rhetorically distance his cosmopolitanism from traditional natural law theory. In this paper, I argue that the necessary foundation for Kant’s cosmopolitan subjectivity and right was forged in the experience of (...) European colonialism and the (pre-Kantian) theory it engendered. It is in this context that we witness the universalization of subjectivity and the subjectivization of right, emerging from the justificatory needs of extra-national jurisdiction and resource appropriation. This form of cosmopolitanism, whose emergence necessarily tracks the rise of global capitalism, continues to exert great and often uncritical influence on theories and practices of peace today. (shrink)

In this accessible introduction for students, teachers, and activists, Chad Kautzer guides readers through the dynamic field of radical philosophy. Kautzer s innovative approach is to organize the analysis of radical philosophical projects from Marxism, feminism, and queer theory to radical environmental, race, and political theory around their defining methodological commitments and emancipatory goals. Beginning with a discussion of the historical, dialectical, and reflexive forms of critique these projects employ, Radical Philosophy reveals the internal structure and overlapping similarities of particular (...) philosophical projects discussed in subsequent chapters. The result is a coherent and systematic introduction for beginners and specialists alike. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for the existence of pathologies of juridicism. I attempt to show that the Western regime of right tends to colonize our intersubjective relations, resulting in the formation of affective and habitual dispositions that actually hinder participation in social life. Speaking of pathologies of juridicism is to claim that the legal form fundamentally contaminates the way in which we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world, resulting in an ethically deformed, distorted or deficient form (...) of subjectivity. To support my thesis I consult a philosopher, whose work still provides a powerful analysis and critique of juridicism, namely, Hegel. Hegel provides an historic and a systematic theory of the pathologies of juridicism. His historical theory locates the origin of the abstract subjectivity of right in Roman antiquity. His systematic theory understands the negative effects of an absolutization of the legal domain as a persistent threat to social integration and an individual’s pursuit of the good life. I clarify these argumentative dimensions in two steps, beginning with Hegel’s historical analysis of right in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History. I then reconstruct Hegel’s critique of the subjectivity of right in the short chapter on the ‘Condition of Right’ in his Phenomenology of Spirit. In conclusion, I argue that, although Hegel’s diagnosis is correct, his prescribed therapy must fail: instead of radically altering abstract right in terms of content and form, it only recommends its complementation through other ethical spheres. (shrink)

In this essay I explore competing senses and tensions of the relation between the etymology of ta pragmata and praxis, with specific attention paid to Heidegger’s theorization of modernity. In so doing I question the relation between rights and persons, and whether there might not be a new way of thinking about rights that does not presuppose or privilege the agency of personhood. Pragmatic rights would not assume the liberal values of self-determination that underpin personhood, and would enable a notion (...) of rights beyond liberal humanism more appropriate for twenty-first century political concerns and problems. (shrink)

The great work of the psychotic judge Daniel Paul Schreber, namely Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, has received predictable and rather unimaginative interpretations as the discourse of a lunatic. The work has not been studied as a theory of law. Schreber, it is argued here, was an extreme lawyer, a radical melancholegalist, a black letter theorist, a critic avant la lettre, and a radical theorist of an impure jurisprudence.

The following interview was conducted on July 13, 2009 at the JFK Institute for Graduate Studies, Freie Universität in Berlin, shortly after a conference, entitled “Class in Crisis: Das Prekariat zwischen Krise und Bewegung,” at which Harvey delivered a keynote address. The conference, organized by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, engaged the political, socio-economic, and conceptual dimensions of the so-called precariat class. The precariat (das Prekariat or la précarité) is typically defined by short-term employment, persistent marginalization, and social insecurity—something of a (...) fragmented urban underclass whose precariousness is increasingly evident in traditionally middle-class economic life. While the concept of the precariat has yet to take root in English-language social theory, the work of Loïc Wacquant (who also delivered a keynote at the Berlin conference), for example, has been popularizing it. (shrink)

Beliefs once limited to the extremes of the North American gun culture have become mainstream, while the US Supreme Court’s ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller and a spate of right-to-carry laws have contributed to the proliferation of guns in public life. These changes in political discourses, legislative agendas, and social practices are indicative of an emergent and pernicious form of subjectivity, which is here defined as self-defensive. Such subjectivity is characterized by a pathological identification with the right of (...) self-defense, which undermines the social conditions of individual freedom and renders subjects unable to comprehend the function of abstract rights within an informal normative order. Practically speaking, this raced and gendered subjectivity relies on extra-legal relations of domination for its reproduction. The rapid expansion of gun rights and the recent loosening of restrictions on self-defensive violence are argued to be responses to a perceived threat to these identity-constituting relations, rather than to the threat of violent crime, which has long been on the decline. (shrink)

Pragmatism has been called "the chief glory of our country's intellectual tradition" by its supporters and "a dog's dinner" by its detractors. While acknowledging pragmatism's direct ties to American imperialism and expansionism, Chad Kautzer, Eduardo Mendieta, and the contributors to this volume consider the role pragmatism plays, for better or worse, in current discussions of nationalism, war, race, and community. What can pragmatism contribute to understandings of a diverse nation? How can we reconcile pragmatism's history with recent changes in the (...) country's racial and ethnic makeup? How does pragmatism help to explain American values and institutions and fit them into new national and multinational settings? The answers to these questions reveal pragmatism's role in helping to nourish the fundamental ideas, politics, and culture of contemporary America. (shrink)

The normative politics of Rorty’s Achieving Our Country are inextricably related to the political-philosophical principles of Contingency,irony, and solidarity, yet the nature of this relation is not explicit, particularly regarding Rorty’s earlier public/private sphere distinctionand renunciation of metavocabularies. This paper argues that Rorty’s call for patriotism as a necessary condition for political practiceand a romantic historicism that replaces intersubjectively recognized history, leads to a privatized conception of the nation, betraying the most promising principles of Contingency, irony, and solidarity, and threatening (...) the necessary conditions of democratic and solidaristic practices. This critique also accounts for the theoretical lacunas in Rorty’s most recent essays attempting to elucidate American Empire. (shrink)

The normative politics of Rorty’s Achieving Our Country are inextricably related to the political-philosophical principles of Contingency,irony, and solidarity, yet the nature of this relation is not explicit, particularly regarding Rorty’s earlier public/private sphere distinctionand renunciation of metavocabularies. This paper argues that Rorty’s call for patriotism as a necessary condition for political practiceand a romantic historicism that replaces intersubjectively recognized history, leads to a privatized conception of the nation, betraying the most promising principles of Contingency, irony, and solidarity, and threatening (...) the necessary conditions of democratic and solidaristic practices. This critique also accounts for the theoretical lacunas in Rorty’s most recent essays attempting to elucidate American Empire. (shrink)

Our symposium on Naomi Zack's newest book, The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality after the History of Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), had its origin in an Author Meets Critics panel of the Radical Philosophy Association at the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division conference in 2012, organized by José Jorge Mendoza. The respondents--Kristie Dotson, Lewis Gordon, José Jorge Mendoza, and Lucius T. Outlaw Jr.--have revised and expanded their original papers and Naomi Zack has in turn provided a detailed response (...) to their contributions. The result is an insightful, critical, and multiperspectival engagement with Zack's work. Throughout the respondents' papers you will find references to the twelve requirements that Zack argues are necessary for an ethics of race. These can be found in an appendix to Naomi Zack's response. (shrink)