The meaning of ‘populism’ Mueller, Axel
Philosophy & social criticism,
12/2019, Volume:
45, Issue:
9-10
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This essay presents a novel approach to specifying the meaning of the concept of populism, on the political position it occupies and on the nature of populism. Employing analytic techniques of ...concept clarification and recent analytic ideology critique, it develops populism as a political kind in three steps. First, it descriptively specifies the stereotype of populist platforms as identified in extant research and thereby delimits the peculiar political position populism occupies in representative democracies as neither inclusionary nor fascist. Second, it specifies on this basis analytically–normatively the particular stance towards liberal representative democracy (in particular towards popular sovereignty and democratic legitimacy) that unifies populism’s political position and explains how populist politics can be compelling for democratic citizens. The normative core (populist ideology) turns out to require no more than two general principles of legitimizing political authority by elections. Surprisingly, it does not need a separate anti-pluralist or exclusionary commitment: it entails it. Third, this normative model allows a response to a contested question in the theoretical discussion, namely, whether populism (properly specified) can be democracy-enhancing. The article defends the negative answer in virtue of the normative core alone and does so as much vis-à-vis a minimal (purely electoral) as vis-à-vis a normatively ambitious (liberal) conception of democracy. The reconstruction of the normative core of populist ideology enables a novel argument to show that populism is incompatible with the continued democratic legitimation of political authority even in the normatively most austere conception of ‘electoral democracy’, not just with ‘liberal democracy’. Assuming a normatively more ambitious concept of democratic legitimation in terms of political autonomy, the model also produces an extremely direct argument showing that populists cannot fulfil their promise of ‘taking back control’ over political decision-making to the population.
Cognition as a Social Skill Haslanger, Sally
Australasian philosophical review,
20/1/2/, Volume:
3, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Much contemporary social epistemology takes as its starting point individuals with sophisticated propositional attitudes and considers (i) how those individuals depend on each other to gain (or lose) ...knowledge through testimony, disagreement, and the like and (ii) if, in addition to individual knowers, it is possible for groups to have knowledge. In this paper I argue that social epistemology should be more attentive to the construction of knowers through social and cultural practices: socialization shapes our psychological and practical orientation so that we perform local social practices fluently. Connecting practical orientation to an account of ideology, I argue that to ignore the ways in which cognition is socially shaped and filtered is to allow ideology to do its work unnoticed and unimpeded. Moreover, ideology critique cannot simply challenge belief, but must involve challenges to those practices through which we ourselves become the vehicles and embodiments of ideology.
Commonplace intuitions tell us that possessing judgment is a political virtue, while inflexible ideological thinking is a sort of political vice. Yet this everyday practical dichotomy has no real ...expression in academic discourse. The closest body of literature involves critical theory’s controversial notion of ideology critique, whose traditional framing is widely considered anti-deliberative and epistemically suspect. In this essay, I reconstruct Hannah Arendt’s account of the relationship between political judgment and ideology, which I suggest aligns closer with commonplace intuitions than any extant literature. Arendt understood ideology as a failure to recognize the distinctive validity of political judgment, a validity which, because of its perspectival character, does not provide objective answers to political questions, although it can assess the quality of such judgments. Ideology represents a politically pathological attempt to inappropriately attribute to one’s judgment the objective validity of truth. Building on recent Arendt-inspired critical theory, I conclude by sketching a version of ideology critique that appeals to intersubjective validity but also affords a vital role for radical social critique.
Neo-liberalism is not working but carries on regardless. A society and all of its institutions modelled on market logics and imperatives has produced system crisis and has lost widespread popular ...support. To account for neo-liberalism’s continuing grip, we must submit this project to ideology critique. Max Horkheimer offers some relevant insights into what this requires. Ideology critique needs to come up with a competing measure of progress, it has to demonstrate why this ought to be the standard and it needs to expose the means by which this alternative is blocked. This article suggests that the normativity that underpins a social democratic project is best placed to prosecute these key tasks in a neo-liberal and historicizing age. It draws upon two major accounts of the ideological battlefield that has been staked out between neo-liberal and social democratic projects, looking to Wolfgang Streeck and Michel Foucault to identify the cultural resources that are available to, and the blocking strategies that have to be negotiated by, ideology critique in neo-liberal times. Finally it, turns to György Markus’s fine-grained and critical reading of the tasks of ideology critique outlined by Karl Marx. This section puts ideology critique into dialogue with a social democratic normativity in order to better consider the traction of ideology critique in a neo-liberal age.
We discuss contemporary theories in mathematics education in order to do research on research. Our strategy consists of analysing discursively and ideologically recent key publications addressing the ...role of theory in mathematics education research. We examine how the field fabricates its object of research by deploying Foucault's notion of bio-politics—mainly to address the object "learning"— and ¿ izek's ideology critique—to address the object "mathematics". These theories, which have already been used in the field to research teaching and learning, have a great potential to contribute to a reflexivity of research on its discourses and effects. Furthermore, they enable us to present a clear distinction between what has been called the sociopolitical turn in mathematics education research and what we call a positioning of mathematics education (research) practices in the Political.
In light of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, this project synthesizes and advances critiques of the possibility of a sustainable capitalism by adopting an explicit 'negative' theory of ideology, ...understood as ideas that conceal contradictions through the reification and/or legitimation of the existing social order. Prominent climate change policy frameworks--the 'greening' of markets (market-corrective measures), technology (alternative energy, energy efficiency, and geoengineering), and growth (the green growth strategy)--are shown to conceal one or both of the two systemic socio-ecological contradictions inherent in the current social formation: (1) a contradiction between capital's growth-dependence and the latter's degrading impact on the climate (the 'capital-climate contradiction') and (2) a contradiction between the potential of using technological infrastructure that aids in emissions reductions and the institutionalized social relations that obstruct this technical potential (the 'technical potential-productive relations contradiction'). Attempts to reform the very techniques and institutions that brought about the climate crisis will remain ineffective and reproduce the social order that results in climate change. After proposing a way in which societies might move out of the ideological trappings of green markets, technology, and growth, two alternatives are proposed: economic degrowth coupled with Marcuse's conception of a 'new technology'.
This paper offers an expository discussion of an approach to qualitative health research we call immanent critique. The central analytic move of immanent critique, as we have practiced it, is to ...explore how claims that are internal to authoritative discourse are experienced by those who have been excluded from their formulation. This paper contributes to the discussion of the politics of qualitative research methods in an age of evidence. We do so by responding to a recent call to move beyond the micro-politics of the qualitative research encounter to consider the overall political effects of qualitative research. We argue that the political effects of research are partly enabled by mundane practices internal to the research process. We explore how this is so by considering one formulation of immanent critique—a qualitative study of the introduction of continuous quality improvement in Ontario hospitals. We emphasize how practices internal to our research—trade union collaboration, our orientation to authoritative claims, and procedures for generating and representing health care workers' experiences—helped shape the political effects of our research. The latter include challenges to managerial claims about neo-liberal health reform and broadening the evidentiary terrain upon which interlocutors can participate in public debate about health care restructuring.
This articles discusses and contextualises tripleC’s republication of Franz L. Neumann’s essay Anxiety and Politics. It provides some background information on Neumann’s life and works. The essay ...ascertains that in the age of new nationalisms, rising right-wing authoritarianism and authoritarian capitalism, Franz L Neumann’s works can help us to critically understand contemporary society.
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