Reconstituting Social Criticism: Political Morality in an Age of Scepticism PDF
Preview Reconstituting Social Criticism: Political Morality in an Age of Scepticism
RECONSTITUTING SOCIAL CRITICISM Reconstituting Social Criticism Political Morality in an Age of Scepticism Edited by Iain MacKenzie Lecturer in Politics Queen's University Belfast Northern Ireland and Shane O'Neill Reader in Politics Queens University Belfast Northern Ireland First published in Great Britain 1999 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-27447-5 ISBN 978-1-349-27445-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-27445-1 First published in the United States of America 1999 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-21742-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reconstituting social criticism : political morality in an age of scepticism /edited byI ain MacKenzie and Shane O'Neill. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-21742-6 (cloth) 1. Social problems. 2. Social ethics. 3. Social justice. 4. Political ethics. I. MacKenzie, Iain M. II. O'Neill, Shane, 1965- . HN28.R435 1998 98-34977 CIP Selection and editorial matter ©Iain MacKenzie and Shane O'Neill 1999 Introduction ©Shane O'Neill 1999 Text © Macmillan Press Ltd 1999 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1999 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 Contents Notes on Contributors vii Acknowledgements ix 1. Introduction: Reconstituting Criticism Today 1 Shane O'Neill I Normative Foundations 2. Defending Universalism 19 Simon Caney 3. Digging up Marx 35 Keith Graham 4. Studying Equality 51 John Baker II Contesting Boundaries 5. Deconstruction and Criticism 67 Aletta J. Norval 6. The Critical Force of Fictive Theory: Jameson, 83 Foucault and Woolf Jon Simons 7. Reconstituting the Subject of Political Discourse: 103 from Lacan to Castoriadis Caroline Williams III The Moral Basis of Criticism 8. Philosophy, Contingency and Social Criticism 123 Nicholas H. Smith 9. A Different Kind of Contract 137 Norman Geras v vi Contents IV Social Conflict and the Possibility of Reconciliation 10. Liberalism and the Challenge of Pluralism 153 Richard Bellamy 11. Are Ethical Conflicts Irreconcilable? 171 Maeve Cooke 12. Two Conceptions of Cosmopolitan Justice 191 Thomas McCarthy Index 215 Notes on Contributors John Baker teaches moral and political philosophy in the Department of Politics at University College, Dublin. He has published a number of scholarly articles and is the author of Arguing for Equality. Richard Bellamy is Professor of Politics at the University of Reading. He is the author of three books including Liberalism and Modern Society, and the editor of eight collections including (with Dario Castiglione) Constitutionalism in Transformation. Simon Caney is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Newcastle. He has published articles in philosophy, politics and law journals on liberalism, communitarianism and international political theory. He is also the co-editor (with Peter Jones and David George) of National Rights, International Obligations. Maeve Cooke teaches in the Department of German at University College, Dublin. She is the author of Language and Reason: a Study of Habermas's Pragmatics and editor of a reader on Habermas's writ ings on communication. She has published numerous articles in contemporary political and social theory. Norman Geras is Professor of Government at the University of Manchester. He has written several books, including Discourses of Extremity and Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind. His contri bution to this collection is drawn from his most recent book, The Contract of Mutual Indifference. Keith Graham is Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Bristol. He has published widely in philosophical and political journals and his books include The Battle of Democracy and Karl Marx, Our Contemporary. Thomas McCarthy is Professor of Philosophy and John Shaffer Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas and Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Vll viii Notes on Contributors Critical Theory and co-author (with David Couzens Hoy) of Critical Theory. lain MacKenzie is Lecturer in Politics at The Queen's University of Belfast. He has published articles on Deleuze and Guattari and is the co-author of Political Ideologies, 2nd edition and of Contemporary Social and Political Theory: An Introduction. Aletta J. Norval is Director of the Programme in Ideology and Discourse at the University of Essex. She has written a number of articles in political theory and is the author of Deconstructing Apartheid Discourse and co-editor of South Africa in Transition: New Theoretical Perspectives (with David R. Howarth). Shane O'Neill is Reader in Politics at The Queen's University of Belfast. He has published a number of articles in politics and philos ophy journals and is the author of Impartiality in Context: Grounding Justice in a Pluralist World and the co-author of Contemporary Social and Political Theory: an Introduction. Jon Simons is Lecturer in the Postgraduate School of Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham and the author of Foucault and the Political. He has also published articles in British, American and Israeli journals. Nicholas H. Smith is Lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He has written articles on the work of Charles Taylor and is the author of Strong Hermeneutics: Contingency and Moral Identity. Caroline Williams teaches political theory at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. She has published essays on Lacanian psychoanalysis, selfhood and subjectivity including a contri bution to Knowing the Difference: Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology, edited by Margaret Whitford and Kathleen Lennon. Acknowledgements The origins of this book are in a conference of the same title held in June 1996 at Queen's University, Belfast. We would like to thank the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom as well as the School of Politics at Queen's for the generous financial support they gave to the conference. We should also like to thank our colleagues and students in politics who helped with the organization of the event. All participants to the conference - especially those who gave papers, including the many that could not be included here - contributed to a memorably stimulating and refreshing intellectual exchange of ideas. Earlier versions of two of the essays have appeared previously in journals. We are grateful to the editors and publishers who have allowed us to reprint this material: John Baker, 'Studying Equality', Imprints, 2 (1997) 57-71; and Maeve Cooke, 'Are Ethical Conflicts Irreconcilable?', Philosophy and Social Criticism, 23 (1997) 1-19. The essay by Simons is part of a book project of his to be published in due course, while Geras's contribution is drawn from his book, The Contract of Mutual Indifference (Verso, 1998). ix 1 Introduction: Reconstituting Criticism Today Shane O'Neill The contributions to this volume locate themselves within the contem porary crisis of philosophically grounded social criticism. At the close of the millennium we find an increasingly pessimistic mood taking hold among philosophers and political theorists who pursue their intellec tual projects with the critical intentions of stimulating and supporting a progressive political agenda. Theoretical self-confidence was a notable characteristic of the socialist vision that had inspired progressive social critics for several generations. The key to an emancipated future, or a just order, was to transform the structure of political economy so as to eliminate the destructive and degrading effects of capitalist markets on human relations. But, in the wake of the collapse of state socialism, and with the emergence of a new global order where the logic of the market reigns virtually unopposed, this theoretical self-confidence has all but evaporated. As Nancy Fraser has recently remarked, one of the consti tutive features of the 'postsocialist' condition in which we now find ourselves is 'the absence of any credible progressive vision of an alternative to the present order'.1 In spite of this absence of a convincing alternative vision, there can be no denying the shocking inequalities and manifest injustices, the oppression and misery, that are also all too evident features of the present order. How is a critical philosophy to address these realities? How are the emancipatory hopes and utopian aspirations of all who suffer unnecessarily to be articulated theoretically today? There is, unquestionably, a disturbing gap between the political aspirations of all who seek a just order and many of the academic research programmes in political philosophy that, despite their avowed inten tions, are failing to connect productively with those aspirations. The contributors to this volume are all concerned to address this gap and to furnish theoretical resources that can be fed into the project of reconstituting a viable and theoretically sustainable critical agenda that is alive to the particular needs of the present age. 1
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