Gerard Delanty provides a comprehensive assessment of the idea of cosmopolitanism in social and political thought which links cosmopolitan theory with critical social theory. He argues that ...cosmopolitanism has a critical dimension which offers a solution to one of the weaknesses in the critical theory tradition: failure to respond to the challenges of globalization and intercultural communication. Critical cosmopolitanism, he proposes, is an approach that is not only relevant to social scientific analysis but also normatively grounded in a critical attitude. Delanty's argument for a critical, sociologically oriented cosmopolitanism aims to avoid, on the one hand, purely normative conceptions of cosmopolitanism and, on the other, approaches that reduce cosmopolitanism to the empirical expression of diversity. He attempts to take cosmopolitan theory beyond the largely Western context with which it has generally been associated, claiming that cosmopolitan analysis must now take into account non-Western expressions of cosmopolitanism.
Does critical theory still need psychoanalysis? In Critique on
the Couch , Amy Allen offers a cogent and convincing defense of
its ongoing relevance. Countering the overly rationalist and
...progressivist interpretations of psychoanalysis put forward by
contemporary critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Axel
Honneth, Allen argues that the work of Melanie Klein offers an
underutilized resource. She draws on Freud, Klein, and Lacan to
develop a more realistic strand of psychoanalytic thinking that
centers on notions of loss, negativity, ambivalence, and mourning.
Far from leading to despair, such an understanding of human
subjectivity functions as a foundation of creativity, productive
self-transformation, and progressive social change. At a time when
critical theorists are increasingly returning to psychoanalytic
thought to diagnose the dysfunctions of our politics, this book
opens up new ways of understanding the political implications of
psychoanalysis while preserving the progressive, emancipatory aims
of critique.
Contemporary theorists use the term “social construction” with the aim of exposing how what's purportedly “natural” is often at least partly social and, more specifically, how this masking of the ...social is politically significant. The chapters in this book draw on insights from feminist and critical race theory to develop the idea that gender and race are positions within a structure of social relations. On this interpretation, the point of saying that gender and race are socially constructed is not to make a causal claim about the origins of our concepts of gender and race, or to take a stand in the nature/nurture debate, but to locate these categories within a realist social ontology. This is politically important, for by theorizing how gender and race fit within different structures of social relations we are better able to identify and combat forms of systematic injustice. The central chapters of the book offer critical social realist accounts of gender and race. These accounts function as case studies for a broader approach that draws upon notions of ideology, practice, and social structure developed through interdisciplinary engagement with research in social science. Ideology, on the proposed view, is a relatively stable set of shared dispositions to respond to the world, often in ways that also shape the world to evoke those very dispositions. This looping of our dispositions through the material world enables the social to appear natural. Additional chapters in the book situate a critical realist approach in relation to philosophical methodology, and to debates in analytic metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language.
This Critical Theory and Contemporary Society volume offers an original analysis of the role of the digital in today’s society. It rearticulates critical theory by engaging it with the challenges of ...the digital revolution to show how the digital is changing the ways in which we lead our politics, societies, economies, media, and even private lives. In particular, the work examines how the enlightenment values embedded within the culture and materiality of digital technology can be used to explain the changes that are occurring across society. Critical Theory and the Digital draws from the critical concepts developed by critical theorists to demonstrate how the digital needs to be understood within a dialectic of potentially democratizing and totalizing technical power. By relating critical theory to aspects of a code-based digital world and the political economy that it leads to, the book introduces the importance of the digital code in the contemporary world to researchers in the field of politics, sociology, globalization and media studies.
Fifty years ago, the two leading German philosophers and sociologists since the Second World War, Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, embarked on a sweeping and contentious debate that would continue ...for decades. This is the first book in English about one of the most important conflicts in social theory today.
This original and ambitious work looks anew at a series of intellectual debates about the meaning of democracy. Clive Barnett engages with key thinkers in various traditions of democratic theory and ...demonstrates the importance of a geographical imagination in interpreting contemporary political change.
Debates about radical democracy, Barnett argues, have become trapped around a set of oppositions between deliberative and agonistic theories-contrasting thinkers who promote the possibility of rational agreement and those who seek to unmask the role of power or violence or difference in shaping human affairs. While these debates are often framed in terms of consensus versus contestation, Barnett unpacks the assumptions about space and time that underlie different understandings of the sources of political conflict and shows how these differences reflect deeper philosophical commitments to theories of creative action or revived ontologies of "the political." Rather than developing ideal theories of democracy or models of proper politics, he argues that attention should turn toward the practices of claims-making through which political movements express experiences of injustice and make demands for recognition, redress, and re pair. By rethinking the spatial grammar of discussions of public space, democratic inclusion, and globalization, Barnett develops a conceptual framework for analyzing the crucial roles played by geographical processes in generating and processing contentious politics.
Critical Affect explores the emotional complexity of critique and maps out its enduring value for the turn to affect and ontology. Through a series of vivid close readings, Ashley Barnwell shows how ...suspicion and methods of decoding remain vital to both civic and academic spaces, where concerns about precarity, transparency, and security are commonplace and the question of how we verify the truth is one of the most polarising of our age. Weaving together both the critical and affective dimensions of 'paranoid reading', Critical Affect opens crucial questions about the ethics of practicing theory and offers a new route into the critical study of affect.?
Syed Hussein Alatas and Critical Social Theory: Decolonizing the Captive Mind offers a variety of historical, religious, and philosophical perspectives into the significance of Syed Hussein Alatas' ...life and thought today.
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