This article proposes that the foundations of Hegel’s contribution to social criticism are compatible with, and enriched by, his meta-theology. His social critique is grounded in his belief that normative ideas – and especially the idea of freedom – are necessarily experiential and historical. Often regarded as a recipe for an authoritarian reconciliation with the status quo, Hegel’s philosophy has been dismissed by some unsympathetic commentators from the left as inimical to the task of social criticism. Much of the reason (...) for this has been the opinion that his systematic approach to philosophy is one underpinned by either a highly unorthodox theism or, more commonly, pantheism. Even scholars who wish to defend Hegel as a social critic have tended to abandon or at least massively downplay his meta-theology. In this article, I argue that it is precisely the emphasis on his original theo-metaphysics that offers a powerful and relevant contribution to social criticism. Hegel then becomes an important contributor, from the tradition of social criticism, to the growing trend in academia and wider society of rethinking the relationship between the religious and the secular, known as post-secularism. The proposition at the centre of his system – that human history and society are necessary moments in the process of divine self-understanding – is not new. But the specifics of Hegel’s concept of God that I am proposing – and, moreover, their implications for his political thought – are new. I propose that Hegel was neither a theist nor a pantheist but, rather, a dialectical panentheist. According to panentheism, God is neither straightforwardly transcendent to nature and history nor immanently identifiable with nature and history, but rather is dynamically and dialectically immanent in the ongoing processes of self-transcendence that are nature and history. If such an interpretation of Hegel’s system is valid then the proposition that his political thought is an exercise in dialectical panentheistic theology is one that is worth making and defending because it has important things to say about his social critique. (shrink)

This article argues that negative dialectics operates within a depth realist framework. Depth realism posits an independent, historically situated, emergent, structured, and differentiated world in which human beings are immersed and with which they interact to preserve or transform. This understanding of the world is explicitly theorized, not by Adorno, but by Roy Bhaskar's depth realism (critical realism). My intention is to firstly highlight the close similarities between Adornoian and Bhaskarian dialectics. Secondly, I highlight some important divergences, especially the deficiencies (...) in Adorno's theory of constellation that stem from his lack of realist theorization, specifically his reliance on concepts that cannot reach beyond a form of subjective idealism. Despite this criticism, I argue that if nonidentity concepts are grasped in the wider context of the basic anthropological materialism or “axial turn” that informs Adorno's thinking, and from which they derive, a case can be made in defense of Adornoian realism. The final two sections explore the implications a depth realist interpretation has for Adorno's understanding of the subject‐object mediation in his social theory, allowing us to move beyond Adorno's famous pessimistic views about the possibilities for political change. (shrink)

This article explores how Axel Honneth's critical theory, when adapted to a materialist depth realism, can be utilised as a critique of Fredrick Hayek's ‘neoliberalism’, an antipolitics influenced by Karl Popper's neo‐positivism. In response to the neoliberal challenge, it is proposed that Axel Honneth's theories of recognition, when grounded in anthropological (‘critical’) materialism, provides a robust defence of an irreducible social agency. When interpreted through this lens, recognition is one aspect of the system of human needs based on subject–subject interactions, (...) the other being a subject–object interaction of humans with non‐human objects. By contrast, Honneth's more recent theory of social freedom relies on a Hegelian process of historical reconstruction and so remains vulnerable to the same epistemic errors that inform neoliberal attempts to universalise homo economicus, that is, of reducing reality to various ways in which it is conceptualised. In this regard, anthropological materialism must presuppose depth realism. The importance of this can be seen when the implications for Honneth's move towards a more orthodox Hegelianism in his more recent works are considered. (shrink)

This book addresses the recent rise in post-secularism in the humanities and social sciences. Post-secularism is the proposition that the secular project begun by the Enlightenment has come to an end. If we define secularism as the historical process of increasing marginalisation of the religious from contributing to debates in the public sphere and the process of public policy formation then it is in crisis. This opens up the intriguing possibility that there may be opportunities for renewed debate about the (...) nature of our "secular age" and the role of religion in modern society. (shrink)

Amarnath Amarasingham, ed., Religion and the New Atheism: A Critical Appraisal. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010. xv + 253 pp. ISBN 978-9-0041-8557-9, hardback £81.00/€139.00/$190.00. Religion and the New Atheism: A Critical Appraisal brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines (religious studies, sociology of religion, sociology of science, philosophy and theology) in order to critically engage with so-called ‘new atheism’. The study is a collection of essays that not so much gives primacy to discrediting the limited scholarship of new atheist (...) literature (although there is plenty of powerful critique to be found in its pages) but demonstrates where we can place new atheism in relation to generally more informed and intellectually rigorous debates about religion and atheism. This review essay examines their powerful arguments and briefly introduces possible Bhaskarian, Hegelian and Darwinian-Marxian contributions to the case against new atheism. (shrink)