Radical Philosophy Issue: 89

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89 Editorial collective Chris Arthur, Ted Benton, Nadine Cartner, Andrew Collier, Diana Coole, Peter Dews, Roy Edgley, Gregory Elliott, Howard Feather, Jean Grimshaw, Kathleen Lennon, Joseph McCarney, Kevin Magill, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford, Sean Sayers Issue editor Chris Arthur Reviews editor Sean Sayers Contributors Judith Stacey is Streisand Professor of Contemporary Gender Studies and Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. Her publications include In the Name of The Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age (Beacon Press, 1996). Bob Carter is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at University College Worcester. He has published extensively on the politics of race, immigration and nationality. Deborah Cook teaches Philosophy at the University of Windsor, Canada. Simon Critchley is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Essex. His recent publications include Very Little... Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy and Literature (Routledge, 1997). Axel Honneth is Director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt.

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philosophy MAY/JUNE 1998

COMMENTARY Families against ‘The Family’: The Transatlantic Passage of the Politics of Family Values Judith Stacey ................................................................................................. 2

ARTICLES Out of Africa: Philosophy, ‘Race’ and Agency Bob Carter ...................................................................................................... 8

Adorno on Late Capitalism: Totalitarianism and the Welfare State Deborah Cook .............................................................................................. 16

Philosophy in Germany Simon Critchley and Axel Honneth ........................................................... 27

REVIEWS Jane Gallop, Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment Peter Benson ................................................................................................ 40 Amitai Etzioni, The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society Finn Bowring................................................................................................ 43 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory Stewart Martin ............................................................................................ 46

Typing (WP input) by Jo Foster Tel: 0181 341 9238 Layout by Petra Pryke Tel: 0171 243 1464 Copyedited and typeset by Robin Gable and Lucy Morton Tel: 0181 318 1676 Production by Stella Sandford Printed by Russell Press, Radford Mill, Norton Street, Nottingham NG7 3HN

Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity Meena Dhanda............................................................................................. 47

Bookshop distribution UK: Central Books, 99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN Tel: 0181 986 4854 USA: Bernard de Boer, 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, New Jersey 07100, Tel: 201 667 9300; Ubiquity Distributors Inc., 607 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217, Tel: 718 875 5491

Mark Neocleous, Administering Civil Society: Towards a Theory of State Power David Stevens .............................................................................................. 51

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks Volume 2 Roger Simon ................................................................................................ 49 Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names Marianna Papastephanou ........................................................................... 50

NEWS Anniversary Blues Peter Osborne .............................................................................................. 52

Cover: Andy Fisher, Cards, 1998 Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd. http://www.ukc.ac.uk/secl/philosophy/rp/

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

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Radical Philosophy Ltd

COMMENTARY

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

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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 families. 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 rudderless 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,

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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 motherhood 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

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– especially boys – leads to increased rates of violence and aggressiveness, as well as a general loss of the civilizing influence marriage and responsible parenthood historically 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 profound. 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-ofwedlock 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 eligibility 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

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gays openly into the military. It is being deployed to prevent sex education, the distribution 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 devastating 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 amendment 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 samesex 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 caretakers 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.

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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 columnist 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 opportunities than the New Democrats to build a centre–left coalition in support of more inclusive family and social values.

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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 particularly 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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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 identity, 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 development 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 Particulars: An African Perspective sets out a propitiatory case, insisting that what unifies us is more fundamental 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 exploring 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 representative 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.

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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 indispensable 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 traditions 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 blandishments, 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 Enlightenment, 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 feminist 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 superiorityʼ (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 worldview. 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 European philosophy during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, notwithstanding their considerable philosophical accomplishments, shared with many of their less cerebral contemporaries uninformed and ignorant views of people of colour, we shift quickly

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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 collection, 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 provides 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 philosophy. 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 incongruities and its political impotence. More crucial reservations emerge around two further, interconnected themes: the meaning of tradition and its relation to

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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 differing 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 European 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 interplay between oneʼs own cultural embeddedness and the shifting horizon of an ever-widening set of cultural resources. In the spirit of this position, Western philosophers 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 correspondence, 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 transcendent 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 attraction 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 integration melds with hermeneutics to produce an African philosophy that trans-cends its spatial location 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.

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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 programmes 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 philosophical 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 intellectual 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

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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 antifoundationalists such as Wittgenstein, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Rorty, Harding or Max Weber?) has itself an interest in accomplishing these ends. Behind Pittmanʼs charge, and constituting the critical 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 fundamentally antithetical to a Eurocentric, foundationalist 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 Alexander 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 political 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 AfricanAmerican 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

categories still requires some specification of how, and in what ways, culture gives rise to community. This point is driven home by Anthony K. Appiahʼs essay in the same volume (he has also made it extensively elsewhere3). Arguing against the notion that ideas constitute communities – what he terms ʻethnophilosophyʼ – Appiah urges a view of intellectuals as rational burrowers in a Popperian ʻWorld Threeʼ and whose perspective has necessarily to be comparative, integrative and critical of the ʻcozy celebration of oneʼs own conceptual and theoretical resourcesʼ (p. 22). Consistently, he also rejects the notion that there is some key body of ideas shared by (black) Africans generally and raises the correlative question of what relevance African philosophy might have for AfricanAmericans. The last part of this lively collection deals with another aspect of African-American philosophy: the application of philosophical concepts to the exploration of racism and exclusion in contemporary USA. These include Adrian M. Piperʼs stimulating efforts to develop an account of xenophobia using Kantʼs notion of personhood (an interesting exegesis with much to say about xenophobia as a psycho-biographical strategy); Laurence Thomasʼs deployment of the notion of moral deference in enabling people to think differently about each other; and Michelle M. MoodyAdamsʼs account of the impact of discrimination and exclusion on self-respect. All are compelling examples

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, respectively, 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 dimensions of ideas or propositions about race or what philosophy might bring to our understanding of a dangerously protean concept, we have a sustained and complex argument about the place and the tasks of ʻAfricana philosophyʼ. Although Outlaw insists that the term ʻAfricana philosophyʼ is a ʻgathering notionʼ, and not a proxy for an immutable essence shared by all Africans, his unsteady combination of genetics and ʻmyth of cultural integrationʼ hermeneutics is unpersuasive. Outlawʼs case for Africana philosophy is as follows (a concise version of this appears in his essay in the Pittman volume). First, it coincides with the situated practices and experiences (ʻlife worldsʼ) of ʻa dispersed geographic raceʼ – that is, ʻa group of persons and peoples with a shared ancestry and descentʼ4 (my italics), who share therefore a relatively permanent place of geographical origin and a relatively distinct gene pool. These factors hold even in diasporic conditions. In turn the situated practices and experiences influence the gene pool and cultural practices to condition raciation – that is, the formation and evolution of the biological and cultural factors collectively characterizing the race. Raciation is an ʻimportant means through which we construct and validate ourselvesʼ, and for this and other reasons ʻwe should understand races … as natural, that is as particular types of bio-social collectivities that develop or evolve, as do all things in the natural world, but in ways that are characteristically humanʼ (pp. 11–12). So African philosophy rests on the existence of an African ʻraceʼ,

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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 convention – 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 connections 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 philosophical narratives in the West. In combination these tasks ensure that attempts to develop an African-American 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 postmodern 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,

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for example, as propositions about the world, or as elements in common sense, practical consciousness – will not do. Africana philosophy, like European philosophy or Indian philosophy, would then be merely a descriptor, 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 proposes 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 undesirable 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 political 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 explanatory 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 communal 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 Africans 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 understood. 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, however, those seeking to challenge prejudice, discrimination 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 [email protected]

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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 twentieth 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 capitalism, 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 individuals 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 capitalismʼ. Simply put, with his state capitalism thesis, Friedrich Pollock alleged that the command and mixed economies of the 1920s and 1930s marked the ʻtransition from a predominantly economic to an essentially political eraʼ.1 Initially, this state capitalism thesis will be contrasted with Adornoʼs own view of twentiethcentury liberal democracies. Later in the article, I

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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 historical 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. Production 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. Constructed 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 capitalism 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 capitalism 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 corporatist 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 machinery … is the pivotal question around which everything 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 assessment 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 capitalism 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 Kirchheimerʼs 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

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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 differences 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 Horkheimer, 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 completely 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

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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 ʻapparatusʼ 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 economic (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 political 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, Horkheimer 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 generally 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 abolished in a nation, intervening intellectual operations, including law, also disappear.ʼ21 There is no ambiguity

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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 (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 characteristic 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 ʻtotalitarianʼ, 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 command 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

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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 difference 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 dominated by unanticipated technological developments that the notion of social relations … has by comparison lost much of its relevance, if it has not become illusory altogetherʼ.31 By contrast, if, as Adorno believed, relations of production are paramount (and forces of production are ʻmediated by the relations of productionʼ) then the industrial society thesis is not true in all respects because the capitalist system still predominates.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 nontotalitarian 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.

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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 ambivalence 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 contemporary 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-

If it has long been argued on the basis of interventionism 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 acknowledged that state intervention tendentially confirms ʻthe crisis theory of capitalismʼ. It does so because ʻthe telos of state intervention is direct political domination

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lectical outcome of the interplay of laws and interests in civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) where individuals 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 mediating between private relations (the family) and the 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:

independent of market mechanismsʼ.43 Aided by the police and the military, and abetted by public authorities (such as state welfare agencies and institutions), the state begins to assume greater economic functions 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 domination 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,

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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 unfetteredʼ. 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 economic crisis, ʻthe enthusiasm for planning and central consultation waned and most governments turned back to the concepts of orthodox monetarismʼ.50 Explaining

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that there were other, deeper, causes for this retrenchment, 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 alienate 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. Furthermore, 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 orthodox 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 economyʼ.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

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domination were pre-existing economic and political factors: ʻNational Socialism did not create the mass-men.… The transformation of men into massmen 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 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 administration, in mass societies ʻadministrations have tended under constraint towards a greater self-sufficiency and independence from their administered subjects, reducing 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 societies, 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 citizens. 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 attitudes 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 historical 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 exploitation 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

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who counsels her than she does from himʼ.60 The administrative apparatus of the welfare state contributes 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 nonetheless 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 conditions 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 totalityʼ.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 organization 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

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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 corporationsʼ.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 nonmarket 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 independent 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 totalitarian 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 resistance 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 needs to be shown is either that Adorno was simply wrong about the primacy of economic factors and their effects on individuals, or that the economically engendered ʻspellʼ is much more limited in its effects than Adorno claimed. While Adorno concurs with Keane that political systems in the West are not entirely totalitarian in character, Keaneʼs view of the welfare state as ʻundermining the commodity formʼ, thereby weakening its ʻgrip on civil societyʼ,67 is questionable when it is recognized that the lionʼs share of the lives of citizens in the West is exhausted in activities of production and consumption which serve the economic system either directly or indirectly. Keane also fails to recognize that the welfare state itself primarily serves economic functions that are largely consonant with the interests of the owners of the means of production. And, unlike Jürgen Habermas, who now generally rejects Adornoʼs views about the primacy of the economy, Keane does not take into account the fact that the equality of citizens formally guaranteed by the welfare state has been achieved ʻonly at the price of autonomyʼ.68 Haunted by the memory of Nazi Germany, and wary of the totalitarian tendencies visible in other countries in the West, Adorno was understandably less convinced than many contemporary writers that Western states would continue to leave spaces open for dissent and radically transformative action. Moreover, the tendencies towards political domination that Adorno observed might well impede (or, at the very least, arrest) the development of both formal democracy and more participatory forms of government concerned with satisfying the needs and interests of all individuals. In his private remarks to Horkheimer about Pollockʼs state capitalism thesis, Adorno wrote that, in contrast to Kafka, who ʻrepresented the bureaucratic hierarchy as hellʼ, Pollock himself had succeeded in transforming hell ʻinto a bureaucratic hierarchyʼ.69 Although Adornoʼs scattered criticisms of the welfare state occasionally appear to corroborate a more nuanced version of Pollockʼs hell-becomehierarchy thesis – inasmuch as tendencies towards political domination can be found in non-totalitarian states – far more important in Adornoʼs work were the underlying economic conditions responsible for the creation of the welfare state. For Adorno, the Charybdis of welfare state administration and control was unquestionably overshadowed by the Scylla of reification and ʻmassificationʼ under late capitalism. To circumvent the political whirlpool, one must first bypass the economic monster.

Notes All translations from texts for which the German edition is cited are by the author. 1. Friedrich Pollock, ʻState Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitationsʼ, Studies in Philosophy and Social Research, vol. IX, no. 2, 1941, p. 207. 2. Ibid., p. 200. 3. Ibid., p. 223. 4. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944, Octagon Books, New York, 1963, p. 222. 5. Ibid., p. 260. 6. Ibid., p. 261. 7. See ibid., p. 293. 8. See ibid., p. 354. 9. Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory, trans. Benjamin Gregg, MIT Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1985, p. 81. 10. David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980, p. 63. 11. Ibid., p. 64. 12. William E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law, MIT Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1994, p. 124. 13. Douglas Kellner, Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD, 1989, pp. 62–3. 14. Ibid., p. 78 15. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, Continuum, New York, 1972, p. xiv. 16. Ibid., p. 37. 17. Ibid., p. 38. 18. Ibid., p. 55. 19. Ibid., p. 54. 20. Ibid., p. 150. 21. Ibid., p. 228. 22. Theodor W. Adorno, ʻReflexionen zur Klassentheorieʼ, in Soziologische Schriften I, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1972, p. 385. 23. Ibid., p. 380. 24. Ibid. 25. Theodor W. Adorno, ʻSocietyʼ, trans. Fredric Jameson, Salmagundi, vol. 3, nos. 10–11, 1969–70, p. 148. 26. Neumann, Behemoth, p. 365. 27. Adorno, ʻReflexionen zur Klassentheorieʼ, p. 377. 28. Ibid., p. 380. 29. Adorno, ʻSocietyʼ, p. 149 (translation altered). 30. Ibid., p. 150. 31. Theodor W. Adorno, ʻLate Capitalism or Industrial Society?ʼ, in V. Meja, D. Misgeld and N. Stehr, eds, Modern German Sociology, Columbia University Press, New York, 1987, p. 232. 32. Ibid., p. 242. 33. Ibid., p. 236. 34. Ibid., p. 237. 35. Ibid. 36. Theodor W. Adorno, ʻDiskussionsbeitrag zu “Spätkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft?”ʼ, in Soziologische Schriften I, p. 583. 37. Adorno, ʻLate Capitalismʼ, p. 244 (translation altered). 38. Ibid., p. 243. 39. Ibid., p. 244 (translation altered). When Adorno speaks of the state as intervening in the economy ʻfrom the

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40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

outsideʼ, he adds that such intervention is also ʻa part of societyʼs immanent dialecticsʼ. By way of explaining the apparent paradox, Adorno refers to Marx, for whom the revolution of relations of production was at one and the same time ʻcompelled by the course of historyʼ and ʻeffective only through an action qualitatively differentiated from the unity of the systemʼ (ibid., p. 244; translation altered). G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1976, p. 152. Adorno, ʻLate Capitalismʼ, p. 244 (translation altered). Ibid., pp. 244–5 (translation altered). Ibid., p. 245. ʻDiskussionsbeitragʼ, p. 584. Christopher Lowe, in an unpublished response to David Belkinʼs ʻThe Left and Limited Governmentʼ, Socialist Forum, June 1996. Herman Van der Wee, Prosperity and Upheaval: The World Economy, 1945–1980, trans. Robin Hogg and Max R. Hall, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986, p. 283. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid. p. 287. Ibid., p. 315. Ibid., p. 320. Ibid., p. 334. Adorno, ʻLate Capitalismʼ, p. 239. Adorno, ʻSocietyʼ, p. 151. Neumann, Behemoth, p. 367. Theodor W. Adorno, ʻIndividuum und Organisationʼ, in Soziologische Schriften I, pp. 451–2.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68.

69.

Adorno, ʻSocietyʼ, p. 151. Adorno, ʻLate Capitalismʼ, p. 243. Ibid., p. 237. Ibid., p. 243. Adorno, ʻReflexionen zur Klassentheorieʼ, p. 389. Ibid., p. 385. Ibid., p. 386. Theodor W. Adorno, ʻCulture and Administrationʼ, trans. Wes Blomster, Telos 37, 1978, p. 105. Adorno, ʻIndividuum und Organisationʼ, pp. 443–4. Lowe, in his unpublished response to Belkinʼs ʻThe Left and Limited Governmentʼ. John Keane, ʻIntroductionʼ, in Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives, ed. John Keane, Verso, London and New York, London and New York, 1988, p. 5. Ibid., p. 7. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1996, p. 418. Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1994, p. 282.

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

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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 generationʼ 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 irrationalism, 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

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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

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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 necessary 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 motivational 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 continuation 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 underestimating, I think, and characteristically underestimating, is that in the 1960s when this generation

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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 Motivationsgeschichte 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

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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 situation. 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?

Jörg Immendorff, Café Deutschland 1, 1978

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 originality. At the present time, I donʼt see anything like that happening. Maybe there are some new

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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-understanding 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 philosophy 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,

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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 philosophy 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

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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 emancipatory 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 consequence 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 roundabout 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 philosophy 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 situation. 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

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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

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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

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critical insights of the Nietzschean and the Freudian traditions. According to my own understanding 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

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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 demonstrates, 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.

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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 FichteRezeption, 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, Philosophisches 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 Philosophy, 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.

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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 argument, 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 Gallopʼs 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 harassment 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

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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. Because harassment makes it harder for women to earn a living, feminists declared it a form of discrimination 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 Alcibiades 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 transferential 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 enquiries 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.

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Margaret Stratton, Justice on TV, from A Guide to the Wasteland, 1991–1993

Was Gallop right in her low opinion of the studentʼs 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

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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 difference 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 sixtyminute 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 circumstances, 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 relationships. 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 discriminationʼ (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 generally recognized as criminal, not because it is sexual, or because it is discriminatory, but because it is harassment 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 referenced, 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 communitarianism 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,

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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 ʻmetastableʼ, 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 excessive 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 societies 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 Enlightenment liberals humans are inherently benign creatures 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. Communitarianism, Etzioni maintains, takes a ʻdynamicʼ or ʻdevelopmentʼ view of the person. It acknowledges that

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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 incentivesʼ. The ʻcore valuesʼ outlined by Etzioni as lying at the heart of a communitarian moral order include a normative 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 different 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 communityʼs 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 concludes, 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 synonymous 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 reproduction is the primary virtue, while ʻautonomyʼ is negatively portrayed as a capricious anti-social individualism 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 personal responsibilities and moral autonomy of individuals. In doing so, he fails to recognize that it is the defiance of social norms and regulations by individuals 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 productive power and efficiency at the cost of alienation, inequality, and a continual reinvention or ʻmodernizationʼ of scarcity. The revolutions that destroyed the feudal order did indeed give birth to a cultural conception 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 civilized 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?

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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, Minneapolis, 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 categories – 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 autonomous 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 diagnosis of autonomous art that Adorno draws on the traditional category of mimesis to transform Platoʼs

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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-domination. 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 Critical 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 published 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 translations 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 critique, 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 HullotKentor 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 Negative 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 philosophical 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 structure. 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 translation, Hullot-Kentorʼs self-understanding of his task as a translator is conceived by analogy with Adornoʼs critique of non-autonomous culture and its deepening during his exile in America. Hullot-Kentor reads Lenhardtʼs translation as the tragically predictable appropriation of Adornoʼs achievements by an American 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 HullotKentor, Lenhardtʼs lack of rigour had merely reinforced this obsolescence by misconstruing Adornoʼs originality as mere outdatedness. For Hullot-Kentor, Aesthetic Theoryʼs obsolescence has been accelerated by its consumerist renewal and his task is to redeem the originality of what appears obsolete, thereby enabling what Martin Jay refers to on the jacket as a ʻsecond chanceʼ. Yet whatever the undoubted merits of HullotKentorʼs 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 ʻnormative questionʼ: what justifies the claims morality makes on us? According to Korsgaard, it must be asked and

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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 developed 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 reciprocity, 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 reciprocity. 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

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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 moralityʼ, 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 Raymond 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 morality, 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 explainingʼ (p. 213). In an extended reply Korsgaard points out that her picture of the pervasiveness of obligation as ʻsomething 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 storylines, 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 Englishspeaking 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 Notebooks filled in the gaps left by the earlier selections, covering religion, education, economics, science, translatability 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 reference 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 positivism. 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 positivism, 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

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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 fragmentariness 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 overcome, seeking to extract the main concepts from the many factual notes in which they are embedded. Joseph Buttigieg suggests, however, that the fragmentary character 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 ʻindividualityʼ. Whereas the metaphysical impulse tends to absorb the particular into the general, history as conceived by Gramsci searches for ways to retrieve the fragment, to ascertain its specificity, and dwell on its difference. The complete text of the notebooks demonstrates 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.

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Levinasʼs philosophy offers a powerful critique of the attitude of indifference to otherness, an indifference 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 collective formations. With his prioritization of a ʻfaceto-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 contemporary intellectuals whose thought he encounters as an event, as singular and irreducible to ʻeconomicʼ representation as the individuals who bore the corresponding 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 indebtedness 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 challenges 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 facticity, 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

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 interpretation 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 metaphysics and modernity will be impressed with the incomparably seductive prose of a thinker who escapes categorization, equidistant as he is from both Cartesianism and post-structuralism, and scarcely representing any other ʻ-ismʼ one might care to name. Marianna Papastephanou

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 political 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 constitutive 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.

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. Neocleous 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 reconceptualization 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.

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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 potentially 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 revolution. 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

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

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 melancholy 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 international 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 combination of architectural grandeur and lack of basic amenities (no running water), characteristic of Old

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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 discussions 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 dogmatism; philosophy as solidarity with established ideas – was offset, in part, by the insights they offered the outsider into how the Cuban party intellectual establishment 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 representation 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 ideological 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 Communist 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 conventionalism, after a bright start. The papers on globalization – ʻGlobalization, what globalization?ʼ – were largely disappointing, though there was an informative paper on the forthcoming 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 discussed 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 prioritization 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 organized 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 visceral 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 established 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-intellectualism and cultural complacency, laced with disingenuous-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

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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-disclosingʼ diagnoses of ʻsocial pathologiesʼ as a legitimate 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 harsh light on the state of the Habermasian problematic purporting to succeed it: methodologically in the awkwardness of Honnethʼs idea of a world-disclosure which is neither ʻaestheticʼ nor concerned with truth, yet is still somehow ʻexplanatoryʼ; more substantively in the idealism of Wellmerʼs conception of a subjectivity formed without renunciation, and the lack of tension in his corresponding conception of art, as just one practice of freedom among others. In its baroque accumulation of ad hoc modifications, the degenerative state of the Habermasian research programme was cruelly exposed. However, unlike their New York compatriots (content to keep playing the scratched record of New School political theory: ʻwhere are your universally discursively justified normative criteria?ʼ), Honneth and Wellmer each displayed intimations of the situation, in their intermittent consciousness of the historical and existentialpolitical thinness of their ʻbetter theoriesʼ. Yet neither appears ready to address the problem at its intellectual source. The most successful session was the one on antiSemitism. Anson Rabinbach argued for the centrality of ʻElements of Anti-Semitismʼ to Dialectic of Enlightenmentʼs argument about Enlightenment, and highlighted the problematic anthropological universalism of its address – the peculiar lack of specificity in an analysis which was a direct response to news of the situation in Germany in 1943. (There are ʻno Jewsʼ in ʻElements of Anti-Semitismʼ.) Andreas Huyssen gave an enthralling reading of Art Spiegelmanʼs comic-book Maus, as a counter to the false polarizations of contemporary debates about representing the Holocaust, in the 54

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name of a non-regressive, reflective form of mimetic approximation. It was during the discussion that followed – six papers into the event – that the words ʻcommodityʼ and ʻreificationʼ were uttered, briefly, for the first time. (Dialectics went without a mention throughout, despite the conference title.) The culture industry was the only one of the bookʼs main themes not to have a session devoted to it, although there were two on aesthetics. The psychoanalytical dimension of the text was, predictably, more eagerly discussed. Joel Whitebrook expressed disquiet about the ʻbad utopianism of a de-differentiated subjectivityʼ in Adornoʼs critique of sublimation, and pressed for a non-egoic conception, ˘ along the lines of Castoriadisʼs work. Slavoj Zi˘ zek compared Horkheimerʼs with Lacanʼs reading of the Kantianism of Sade. For Lacan, he insisted, rather than exemplifying the moral law, Sade betrays the stringency of Kantian ethics. Kantʼs ethics are more Kafkaesque than Sadeian, since we cannot legitimately determine in advance the content of the duty we are nonetheless commanded to perform. However, in its identification of the pleasure we derive from our ˘ defences against superegoic regulation, Zi˘ zek judged Dialectic of Enlightenment a ʻpresentimentʼ of an important phenomenon which is far more prevalent today. This was the strongest positive judgement of the book offered over the three days. The closest thing to an Adornian paper was given by a Derridean, Alex Düttmann, who spoke about the constitutive role of exaggeration in thought. Which takes us back to our starting point. How do Habermasians celebrate Dialectic of Enlightenment? Tied firmly to the mast. Peter Osborne

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 Introduction 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 ʻpsychological and semiological sciencesʼ at the top of a hierarchy of strata, each of which ontologically 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 cognitive 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 understanding. 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 motivations and emotions, for instance, as discursively constructed. With his interest in psychoanalysis, 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 ecosocialist 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. Nevertheless we need to know about psychological mechanisms if, through collective human

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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 indifference, 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 postgraduate 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: Peter Osborne, Jonathan Rée and Alexander García Düttmann Write to: Admissions Enquiries, Middlesex University, White Hart Lane, London N17 8HR Tel: 0181 362 5703 [email protected] MA Modern European Philosophy & MA Aesthetics and Art Theory are part of the Humanities MA Degree Scheme

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MA Modern European Philosophy MA Aesthetics & Art Theory