In None so Fit to Break the Chains Dan Swain offers an interpretation of Marx's ethics that foregrounds his commitment to working class self-emancipation and uses it as a guiding thread to interpret a number of different aspects of Marx's ethical thought. This commitment is frequently overlooked in discussions of Marx's ethics, but it deeply influenced his criticism of capitalism, his approach towards an alternative, and his conception of his own role as activist and theorist. Foregrounding self- (...) class='Hi'>emancipation offers new perspectives on various existing debates in the interpretation of Marx, such as the meanings of concepts like alienation, exploitation and utopianism, and can also offer insights into broader questions of the relationship between critical theory and practice. (shrink)

This is an edited transcript of a keynote paper given at IACR's 2021 Annual Conference. The paper outlines a critical realist approach to critique and illustrates its application to the contemporary economy. It argues that responsible, constructive critique depends on ethics, on causal explanation, and on the development of utopian visions. Utopias are tools, and concrete utopias are not visions of whole alternative ready-made societies, but rather partial models that can be built in practice as elements of the larger (...) social world. The argument is illustrated with three cases of digital utopianism, which help to demonstrate the practical challenges facing utopian schemes. Concrete utopias are a vehicle for combining our theoretical understandings of possibilities with an ethical analysis of needs in order to offer practical schemes for improving human flourishing. (shrink)

This study investigates the effect of country-level emancipative forces on corporate gender diversity around the world. Based on Welzel’s theory of emancipation, we develop an emancipatory framework of board gender diversity that explains how action resources, emancipative values and civic entitlements enable, motivate and encourage women to take leadership roles on corporate boards. Using a sample of 6390 firms operating in 30 countries around the world, our results show positive single and combined effects of the framework components on board (...) gender diversity. Our research adds to the existing literature in a twofold manner. First, our integrated framework offers a more encompassing, complete and theoretically richer picture of the key drivers of board gender diversity. Second, by testing the framework empirically, we extend the evidence on national drivers of board gender diversity. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy of moral motivation has much to say about the nature of moral beliefs and truths, but it has less to say about emancipation. By neglecting to discuss the emancipatory aspect of motivation, I argue, moral epistemology is neglecting a topic that should be central. Starting from Charles Taylor’s concern for the status of moral sources, the paper’s main points are that moral motivation has a distinctive emancipatory dimension which has been largely neglected in mainstream debates; that the (...) issue of emancipation can only be adequately conceptualized at the intersection of normative ethics and metaethics; that a full-blooded account of motivation must incorporate a phenomenology of motivational experience, which in turn requires extending the concept of motivation beyond a narrow definition to include such notions as meaning, articulation, identity, and freedom, and criticizing conceptions of motivation that are blind to or take for granted the quality of motivation; and thus providing the resources for a thick conception of motivation that breaks new ground by overcoming the existing boundaries between normative ethics and metaethics. (shrink)

The interpretation of the theoretical content of the ethics of Democritus, as well as of its place in the history of ethical thought, encounters a special difficulty. Democritus' ethics, which has come down to us in fragments, the authenticity of which is still a matter of debate, is full of evident contradictions. It contains mutually exclusive judgments on questions which were the principal subject matter of the intellectual polemics in ethics in the fifth century B.C. On the (...) one hand, Democritus put forth a rather definite naturalistic-individualistic thesis: "Pleasure and displeasure form the boundary between what is useful and what is harmful." On the other hand, he intellectualizes moral motives and states his belief in the existence of general ethical determinations: "There is one and the same good and one and the same truth for all people, whereas one thing is agreeable to one person, another thing to another." Democritus is just as contradictory on the question of the moral value of the state. We find in him an unambiguous affirmation equating a moral individual with the citizen of a city state: "The interests of the state should be above everything else, and we must see to it that it is well governed. To assist in this, we must not struggle against justice and use force for our own benefit against the general good. For a well-governed state is a mighty bastion: it encompasses all, and as long as it persists, everything is as one, but if it should perish, all perishes with it." Yet at the same time a moral model of actions for him involves emancipation from laws: "He called laws a bad invention and said: "The wise man should not obey the laws, he live freely.". (shrink)

RESUMEN La concepción antropológica desplegada en los Manuscritos del '44 puede verse como una constante en toda la obra de Marx, siendo de especial importancia para trazar una lectura ética de nociones políticas fundamentales como las de emancipación social, tiempo libre o comunismo. En función de esto se desarrollan los conceptos de ser genérico y ser social con el objetivo de establecer los rasgos principales de la ontologia marxiana y, desde allí, identificar los principales elementos filosóficos que harían a la (...) perspectiva critica del propio Marx y su proyecto emancipatorio. ABSTRACT The anthropological conception deployed in the Manuscripts of 1944 can be seen as a constant throughout Marx's work, and is of particular importance for drawing an ethical reading of fundamental political notions such as social emancipation, free time or communism. On this basis, the concepts of generic and social being are developed in order to establish the main features of the Marxian ontology and to identify the main philosophical elements that would found the critical perspective of Marx and his emancipatory project. (shrink)

The way in which Foucault confronts Husserl helps to highlight the instance that drives Foucauldian research and its current legacy. Foucault inscribes his work through Husserl within a broader tradition, namely, that of the critical thinking that has crossed all of modernity from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and up to phenomenology. His main legacy can be identified precisely in the way he relaunches and radicalises this tradition by intensifying its critical gaze. We will follow the steps of The Crisis (...) of European Sciences to evoke the underlying purposes of Husserl's work, showing how his genealogical analysis of scientific knowledge, as a mix of historically determined practices, is guided by the ethical aim of self-determination. Later we will show how Foucault takes up this instance in a completely original way, and we will analyse which analogies and differences can be traced between the two authors’ approaches to the problem of an individual's self-determination in his relationship with the network of knowledge-power in which he is immersed. In fact, both authors consider that there can be no emancipation and self-determination of the individual without a preliminary historical-critical retrospective on knowledge and on the ways in which its contents have been constituted. But this retrospective, which we could define generically as genealogical (genetic-phenomenological in Husserl's terms), is played out differently by the two authors and implemented by Foucault with a greater degree of radicalism. (shrink)

Emancipation is a legitimate human interest. It may be said that Foucault in his last works is concerned with putting forward a strategy for emancipation. The strategy consists in an aesthetic construction of the self. It is argued that this strategy ultimately fails and that, instead of retreating to the self, we need to return to the community level and to examine the rules of discourse that operate there. Contrary to Foucault's strategy, Habermas argues that what we need (...) is a communicative rationality capable of correcting discursive distortions. Coming from a different angle, Lyotard argues that what we need at the community level is a set of rules that prevent any one discourse totalizing all others. Such rules would ensure just gaming. Together, Lyotard and Habermas offer us an ethics that has the potential to serve the human interest in emancipation. (shrink)

The modern idea of emancipation is linked to the goal of overcoming dependencies and domination. However, as argued in the article, negative dialectics of emancipation must also be problematized. The project of emancipation, as it was formulated in the Age of Enlightenment, was often particular and was associated with the establishment of new forms of domination. Especially the project of liberation from the constraints of nature through technical development led to the domination of nature. In view of (...) the ecological crisis, the dark side of this project is becoming apparent today. The ecological base of human development is at risk. It is therefore necessary to pursue the idea of a reflexive emancipation, which also takes nature into account in order to enable a sustainable technology development. Emancipatory Technology Studies should therefore support an emancipatory technology policy which promotes a positive dialectical movement that overcomes the contrast between submission to nature and technical mastery of nature. (shrink)

The growing sophistication in the Soviet discussion about man and morality carries with it the threat that human autonomy may recover some of its Marxian originality in contrast with the Leninist-Stalinist insistence on a mechanist determinism.

Max Weber has shown that the informing spirit of Western capitalism originated from the Christian Reformation. The capitalist spirit can be regarded as a stand-in of Western modernity as a whole. Western modernity was initially the outcome of the theology of Calvinism. Calvinist modernity inspired political revolutions that since the seventeenth century irreversibly transformed Western feudal societies into bourgeois democratic nation-states. Something comparable happened in India in the nineteenth century with the rediscovery of Vedanta. Rediscovery, reinterpretation and public dissemination of (...) Vedanta constituted the Indian version of a Reformation. In the beginning of the twentieth century this Vedantic Reformation inspired the revolutionary political movement, which sought to free India from foreign domination. Vedanta was regarded as informing the spirit of Indian modernity because Vedanta emphasizes individual emancipation. This same emancipation was to imply collective emancipation from the bonds of colonialism and tyranny. These values of Vedantic modernity remain an important source of inspiration for the socio-political emancipation of the whole of the Indian population. (shrink)

This is the first book to offer a systematic comparison of the philosophies of Albert Camus and Frantz Fanon. It shows how the ethical, political, and psychological outlooks of these two influential thinkers can further our understandings of how to bring about justice in the face of deep power imbalances. The author foregrounds the bloody Algerian War of Independence in his analysis of the philosophies of Camus and Fanon. Although neither supported French colonial occupation of Algeria, they held radically different (...) views of the conflict. Fanon supported emancipation through violence, which the author argues has been uncritically romanticized. Camus, on the other hand, supported an ethics of moderation that shunned indiscriminate violence. The author argues that Camus has been unfairly accused of being an apologist for colonialism. Finally, the author draws out the common endorsement of humanist values that drive both Camus' and Fanon's thought. Camus and Fanon on the Algerian Question will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in twentieth-century Continental philosophy, postcolonialism, existentialism, and African philosophy. (shrink)

The fight for emancipation takes place on different levels, and one of them is the level of contemporary financial capitalism as debt-economy. Debt can be a major tool of control and exploitation in that it produces subordinate subjects situated in exchange relations of debt and credit. Recent work on financial debt and the debt-economy has, however, not taken gender adequately into account in philosophical definitions of indebted subjects. Gender analysis discloses how the debtor–creditor relationship is based on a contractarian (...) idea of the indebted subject as an autonomous moral agent, and on a masculine, that is, a-relational understanding of what counts as debt and what does not in the contemporary debt-economy. In contrast to atomistic notions of the subject in liberal, contractarian theories, relational notions of the subject as advanced in care ethics are a better point of departure for capturing the interdependence of subjects within a debt-economy as a core feature of a nonsustainable monetary system. On the basis of such analysis, care ethics also offers means for imagining ways of emancipation from private and public problem credit in order to make financial systems more sustainable and more just. (shrink)

Academic and public debate is continuing about whether digital nomadism, a new Internet-enabled phenomenon in which digital workers adopt a neo-nomadic global lifestyle, represents ‘real’ emancipation for knowledge workers—or if it is, instead, the opposite. Based on a field study of digital nomadism, and accepting a pluralist approach to emancipation, we analyse the ‘emancipatory project(s)’ that digital nomads engage in. This analysis, following Weberian idealtypes, employs a tripartite structure: unsatisfactory conditions (what people want to overcome); emancipatory means (actions (...) taken); and emancipatory ends (desired outcomes). We critically compare digital nomadism to the traditional descriptions of emancipatory projects in nation-state contexts, as found in prior literature, using the same analytical framework. Juxtaposing these idealtypes, we discuss similarities and differences and analyse their inherent assumptions, logics and ethical stances. We conclude that digital nomadism generates an emancipation that is very much ‘real’ for digital nomads, whose experience cannot be disregarded, but with a ‘postmodern’ ethos that is at odds with modernity and its ethos originating from the Enlightenment. (shrink)

This paper presents a theoretical elaboration of the ethical framework of classical capitalism as formulated by Adam Smith in reaction to the dominant mercantilism of his day. It is seen that Smith's project was profoundly ethical and designed to emancipate the consumer from a producer and state dominated economy. Over time, however, the various dysfunctions of a capitalist economy — e.g., concentration of wealth, market power — became manifest and the utilitarian ethical basis of the system eroded. Contemporary capitalism, dominated (...) as it is by large corporations, entrenched political interests and persistent social pathologies, bears little resemblance to the system which Smith envisioned would serve the common man. Most critiques of capitalism are launched from a Marxian-based perspective. We find, however, that by illustrating the wide gap between the reality of contemporary capitalism and the model of amoral political economy developed by Smith, the father of capitalism proves to be the most trenchant critic of the current order. (shrink)

With his concept of the social unconscious, Erich Fromm showed that the reproduction of social ideologies depends on the suppression of specific social contradictions. Fromm’s concept represents an extension of Freud’s individual-based approach to the unconscious combined with a Marxist-influenced critique of society. In this paper, I will argue that Fromm’s concept of the social unconscious is not only an indispensable component of an emancipative social critique. Furthermore, I will argue that it is through Fromm’s concept that the productive relationship (...) between philosophy, in the sense of an ethical-political social critique, and psychoanalysis becomes fully apparent. (shrink)

This article focuses on the ethical quandary of Zygmunt Bauman’s interpretation of modernity as a double logic that heralds both emancipation and domination. After outlining his liberation sociology and the liquid moral ontologies he discerns, it argues Bauman’s solution to the consumption of ethics by consumerism demands too much, too late. Firstly, Bauman misappropriates Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction. The actual outcome is the dissipation of the Levinasian centrifugal self, whom Bauman wants to uphold as a cure (...) for the Nietzschean centripetal self. Secondly, as Daniel Miller shows, totalizing critiques of consumerism – such as Bauman’s – blind us to forms of moral self-constitution within consumption. And, thirdly, Bauman’s concept of the autonomous agent overlooks the power relations that are inherent to the constitution of subjectivity. Notwithstanding, Bauman highlights the need to articulate an ethics of freedom, and the article concludes with Foucault’s aesthetics of existence to meet this challenge. (shrink)

This article addresses the complex reflections regarding gender relations expressed by women active in the contemporary Islamic revival movements in Europe (especially France and Germany). Much recent research conducted among these groups aims to counter the rather negative accounts prevailing in public discourses on gender and Islam. This literature notably argues that women's conscious turn to Islam is not necessarily a reaffirmation of male domination, but that it constitutes a possibility for agency and empowerment. However, when faced with certain ‘traditionalist’ (...) positions defended by these women, even this well-meaning literature seems precarious, left in a state of uncertainty. Taking this puzzlement as a point of departure, this contribution aims to think about the dilemmas involved in articulating a language for women's dignity and self-realization, which competes with dominant languages of equality, individual rights and autonomy. This project is rendered even more intricate by the fact that these pious Muslim women socialized in Europe have also been partly fashioned by the liberal discourses against which they want to position themselves. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric, Reflection, and Emancipation: Farrell and Habermas on the Critical Studies of CommunicationG. Thomas GoodnightThere are moments in history that appear to be alive with emancipatory possibilities. Such were the years moving toward the end of the long twentieth century. In spring 1989, students protested the communist regime in China; the Tiananmen Square massacre initiated an episode of opposition and commenced China’s modern journey toward global reengagement. Revolutions (...) in Europe that autumn were more peaceful. On August 23 two million Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian citizens held hands and announced the Baltic Way as a departure from Soviet rule. Transitions rapidly followed in Hungary, Bulgaria, and East Germany, culminating in the Velvet Revolution where on November 17 student protests were beaten back by police in Prague only to be followed three days later by an assembly of 200,000 demanding the transfer of power from the Communist Party. On December 3, George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev jointly announced an imminent end to the fifty-year-old Cold War. During this time of hopeful transition, two scholars were at work refiguring the philosophical mission of the Frankfurt school, transforming critique from its early totalizing posture into the critical study of communication.Thomas B. Farrell and Jürgen Habermas were trained in different traditions but adjacent disciplines, communication and sociology. Their works [End Page 421] share a commitment to philosophical inquiry directed toward critique and understanding the cultural, social, and linguistic constitution of communication. As a rhetorician and as a philosopher, these scholars share an evident passion for scholarly argument and for engagement with the controversies of public culture. In different ways, both were at work during the portentous years of transition from the Cold War to new democracies and incipient globalization. Each constructed a guarded program of hope in the possibilities of communicative reflection and reasoning. In the post-World War II era, such a broad, positive vision took long to develop. After the brutal realities of the Holocaust became publicly known in the late 1940s, “the generous faith in rationality and the possibilities of human progress which underlay much of earlier historical thought seems discredited today” (Katznelson 2003, 2). The Enlightenment possibilities for reason had been invested in the technical efficiency of modern institutions that produced the capacity to kill systematically without constraints. Ira Katznelson points to a generation of scholars—including individuals at Chicago, Columbia, the New School, and others—who began in the 1950s to engage in a project that would “shade the Enlightenment’s philosophical anthropology, thicken its defenses against evil, deepen its capacity to reason, and restore” an Enlightenment more critical and less susceptible to co-optation by the excesses of nationalism, ideology, and evil (2003, 2). The work of Farrell and Habermas belongs to the extended post-Holocaust moment, where the possibilities of reflective reason in ethical and moral deliberations were set carefully on a road to personal and collective emancipation.Max Horkheimer saw in the modern, postwar welfare state little reason for optimism. Writing in 1946 at the beginning of the Cold War, he concluded: “Language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society” (1974, 22). “Salestalk” by “the surrogates of culture” creates an “illusory triumph of democratic progress that consumes the intellectual substance on which democracy has lived” (Horkheimer 1974, 31). Scientifically engineered propaganda renders public opinion as “a substitute for reason.” With such tools, the forces of barbarism are always waiting in the wings to seize power. Early on, Habermas shared these views. His thesis, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989a), tracks the opening possibilities of communicative reasoning in the liminal spaces of eighteenth-century coffeehouses where frank talk replaced hierarchically driven politeness, the development of these talks into the practices of deliberative democracy, and the decline of deliberative democracy with the union of the state and mass media in producing spectacles in [End Page 422] support of rituals of legitimation. Habermas broke with Horkheimer over the dissertation, however. A thesis of decline, by itself, leaves open only the route of totalizing critique. While never far from critique of institutional practices, Habermas spent his career in opening a positive... (shrink)

As part of a (bio)colonial project, the biological information of Indigenous Peoples has historically been under scientific scrutiny, with very limited benefits for communities and donors. Negative past experiences have contributed to further exclude Indigenous communities from novel developments in the field of omics research. Over the past decade, new guidelines, reflections, and projects of genetic research with Indigenous Peoples have flourished in Australia, providing opportunities to move the field into a place of respect and ethical relationships. This review explores (...) the ethical and cultural implications of the use of biological samples from Indigenous communities in biomedical research. A structured framework outlining emerging topics of interest for the development of respectful omics research partnerships with Indigenous Australians is presented. This paper highlights aspects related to Indigenous governance, community and individual consent, respectful handling of biological samples, data management, and communication in order to protect Indigenous interests and rights and to promote communities’ autonomy. (shrink)

This paper explores potential points of synthesis between two leading theorists in Critical Theory and Critical International Relations Theory, Axel Honneth and Andrew Linklater. Whereas Linklater's recent work on the harm principle has turned away from the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School in favour of Norbert Elias and process sociology, the paper observes a fundamental complementarity between harm and the precepts of recognition theory that can bridge these otherwise disparate approaches to emancipation. The paper begins with a (...) brief overview of Linklater's emancipatory vision before examining his recent turn to the harm principle and Eliasian process sociology. It is argued that Honneth's work, particularly the ideas of mutual recognition and the diagnosis of social pathologies, clearly resonant with Linklater's defence of ethical universalism and can help further the emancipatory project of Critical International Relations Theory. In particular, Honneth's intersubjective concept of autonomy is argued to provide a normative and empirical standard for emancipation premised on the historically progressive expansion of attitudes of recognition, born out of social struggles, toward the ideal institutionalisation of mutual recognition in world politics. (shrink)

A daring marriage of philosophical theory and practical politics, this collection is the first of Gianni Vattimo's many books to combine his intellectual pursuits with his public and political life. Vattimo is a paradoxical figure, at once a believing Christian and a vociferous critic of the Catholic Church, an outspoken liberal but not a former communist, and a recognized authority on Nietzsche and Heidegger as well as a prominent public intellectual and member of the European parliament. Building on his unique (...) position as a philosopher and politician, Vattimo takes on some of the most pressing questions of our time: Is it still possible, long after Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, to talk of moral imperatives, individual rights, or political freedom? Are these values still relevant in today's world? Tackling these crucial issues, Gianni Vattimo argues that nihilism is not the absence of meaning but a recognition of a plurality of meanings; it is not the end of civilization but the beginning of new social paradigms. Commonly associated with the pessimistic belief that all of existence is meaningless, nihilism, as a philosophical principle, is far less sensational -- it is the ethical doctrine that there are no moral absolutes or infallible natural laws, that "truth" is inescapably subjective. Because the conditions for equality and liberty are not "naturally" given, society must actively create these ideals or it will inevitably fall prey to irrationality, prejudice, and oppression. Vattimo contends that the infighting, timidity, and confusion that have overtaken contemporary liberal thought and politics are the products a prolonged and indulgent mourning over the loss of the transcendental father figure -- any institution or power structure that defines truth, knowledge, and reality. Until humanity overcomes its need for external authority -- whether it be organized religion, the nation-state, or free-market capitalism -- emancipation will remain unattainable. Collecting fourteen of Vattimo's most influential essays on ethics, politics, and law, _Nihilism and Emancipation_ is a provocative reevaluation of meaning, values, and the idea of freedom in Western culture. (shrink)

Critical research is becoming increasingly accepted as a valid approach to research in information systems. It is deemed to be particularly suitable for situations where researchers want to address conspicuous injustice, such as in areas of development or the digital divide. Critical research in information systems (CRIS), I will argue, is a possible approach to some of the ethical problems arising in the context of information and communication technology (ICT). It can be sensitive to the question of culture and therefore (...) suitable for researching cross-cultural ethical questions in ICT. It is often unclear, however, what exactly critical research stands for and to what extent critical approaches are applicable across cultural boundaries. This paper will address these problems by proposing a definition of critical research as focused on changing the status quo and aiming for emancipation. It will then look at the question whether different cultures are compatible and comparable and what the role of culture in research on information systems is. The paper will then return to the question whether the critical intention to emancipate and empower humans is an expression of cultural imperialism or whether there are valid ways of promoting emancipation across cultural divides. (shrink)

A daring marriage of philosophical theory and practical politics, this collection is the first of Gianni Vattimo's many books to combine his intellectual pursuits with his public and political life. Vattimo is a paradoxical figure, at once a believing Christian and a vociferous critic of the Catholic Church, an outspoken liberal but not a former communist, and a recognized authority on Nietzsche and Heidegger as well as a prominent public intellectual and member of the European parliament. Building on his unique (...) position as a philosopher and politician, Vattimo takes on some of the most pressing questions of our time: Is it still possible, long after Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, to talk of moral imperatives, individual rights, or political freedom? Are these values still relevant in today's world? Tackling these crucial issues, Gianni Vattimo argues that nihilism is not the absence of meaning but a recognition of a plurality of meanings; it is not the end of civilization but the beginning of new social paradigms. Commonly associated with the pessimistic belief that all of existence is meaningless, nihilism, as a philosophical principle, is far less sensational--it is the ethical doctrine that there are no moral absolutes or infallible natural laws, that "truth" is inescapably subjective. Because the conditions for equality and liberty are not "naturally" given, society must actively create these ideals or it will inevitably fall prey to irrationality, prejudice, and oppression. Vattimo contends that the infighting, timidity, and confusion that have overtaken contemporary liberal thought and politics are the products a prolonged and indulgent mourning over the loss of the transcendental father figure--any institution or power structure that defines truth, knowledge, and reality. Until humanity overcomes its need for external authority--whether it be organized religion, the nation-state, or free-market capitalism--emancipation will remain unattainable. Collecting fourteen of Vattimo's most influential essays on ethics, politics, and law, _Nihilism and Emancipation_ is a provocative reevaluation of meaning, values, and the idea of freedom in Western culture. (shrink)

This paper proposes a conversation between Jacques Rancière and feminist care ethicists. It argues that there are important resonances between these two bodies of scholarship, thanks to their similar indictments of Western hierarchies and binaries, their shared invitation to “blur boundaries” and embrace a politics of “impropriety”, and their views on the significance of storytelling/narratives and of the ordinary. Drawing largely on Disagreement, Proletarian Nights, and The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, I also indicate that Rancière’s work (...) offers crucial and timely insights for care ethicists on the importance of attending to desire and hope in research, the inevitability of conflict in social transformation, and the need to think together the transformation of care work/practices and of dominant social norms. (shrink)

This highly original book examines, for the first time, how the patient movement, which works to improve the quality of healthcare, can actually be considered an emancipation movement when led by its radical elements.

Nietzsche has been accused by Habermas of abandoning the pursuit of emancipation and truth. Ironically, this pursuit is at the core of Nietzsche’s works, though radically transformed. The pursuit of knowledge requires emancipated sovereign individuality, a severe honesty, and the courage to follow one's most rigorous use of reason and creative insight wherever they may lead, including the most disturbing insights about truth, language and reason themselves. The first part of this paper discusses Nietzsche’s ideas of individual sovereignty and (...) the associated ideas of emancipation and transformation necessary to this. The next section entitled The Question of Truth: Beyond Universalism and the Quest for Foundations and Certainty deals with how knowledge and truth are intelligible notions in the absence of certainty and absolute standards of truth. The following section, Nietzsche, Habermas and Social Solidarity shows how Habermas’s attempt to ground morality in his discourse ethics cannot succeed once the Nietzchean insight into truth is understood. In the final part, The Irony of Sovereign Individuality, I argue that morality is inconsistent with the individuality that it is supposed to uphold. Nietzsche’s ethical ideal provides a model for concrete individuality that offers the most powerful ethical contribution to social solidarity, given the failure of any grounded morality. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between political freedom and collaboration in the work of human rights organizations. I focus here on the ethical and political implications involved in the production of evidence once the documenting tool, the camera, is in the hands of an engaged civilian rather than a bystander, such as a photojournalist. By examining cases in the Occupied Palestinian Territories where the Palestinians are the photographers of human rights violations, I outline the relations and tensions between emancipatory acts (...) and collaboration via visual information production. Human rights organizations laud new technology and celebrate the participation of those afflicted by such violations in knowledge production as a form of empowerment, and those afflicted may experience the visual practice as a mode of self-representation. But inevitably such a practice is based on collaborative action. In the Israeli/Palestinian conflict case study below, such collaboration has negative effects, which impinge upon the emancipatory features of this mode of documenting. (shrink)

Levinas’s ethics has not been able to address the plethora of human challenges arising from the ethical quicksand and moral quandaries in our existential world. The problem of ethics in Levinas’ s philosophical cum phenomenological analysis, is the problem of human communication, social interaction, human emancipation, freedom, and existential/ metaphysical relations. Freedom has become not just a hot concept in different fields of study, but a very powerful and a driving concept. For Levinas, freedom is not just (...) the absence of constraints or impediments but obedience to laws and even the laws of nature inclusive. This paper adopted the method of hermeneutic to critically analyze Levinas’s phenomenological ethics. This paper concludes by exposing the facts that human communication or interaction is based on understanding and the ethics of difference is part and parcel of inter-subjectivity. Dasein is always faced with the fulfilment in its lived temporality. A sharing of the world is an essential characteristics of human togetherness. Dasein, in its dialogical engagement and existential commitment is usually based on freedom, strife, world sharing and resistance. Dialogical philosophy is the foremost part of world’s cosmic law of concrete social network. (shrink)

Ask any Civil War historian about the cost of the Civil War and they will recite a host of well-known assessments, from military casualties and government expenditures to various measures of direct and indirect costs. But those numbers are not likely to include an appraisal of the humanitarian crisis and suffering caused by the wartime destruction of slavery. Peace-time emancipation in other regions and in other societies certainly presented dangers and difficulties for the formerly enslaved, but wartime emancipation (...) chained the new opportunities and possibilities for freedom to war’s violence, civil chaos, destruction and deprivation. The resulting health crisis, including illness, injury, and trauma, had immediate and lasting consequences for black civilians and soldiers. Although historians are more accustomed to thinking of enslaved people as the beneficiaries of this war, rather than its victims, we cannot assess the cost of this war until we answer two important questions: first, what price did enslaved people have to pay because their freedom was achieved through warfare rather than a peacetime process; and secondly, in this war in which so many Americans paid such a high cost, to what extent did racism inflate the cost paid by people of African descent? In answering these questions, we reconsider this specific war, but we must also tie the U.S. Civil War to a larger scholarship on how wars impact civilians, create refugee populations, and accelerate harsh treatment of people regarded as racial, religious, or ethnic outsiders. We are reminded that war is not an equal-opportunity killer. (shrink)

The ethics of artificial intelligence is an upcoming field of research that deals with the ethical assessment of emerging AI applications and addresses the new kinds of moral questions that the advent of AI raises. The argument presented in this article is that, even though there exist different approaches and subfields within the ethics of AI, the field resembles a critical theory. Just like a critical theory, the ethics of AI aims to diagnose as well as change (...) society and is fundamentally concerned with human emancipation and empowerment. This is shown through a power analysis that defines the most commonly addressed ethical principles and topics within the field of AI ethics as either to do with relational power or with dispositional power. Moreover, it is concluded that recognizing AI ethics as a critical theory and borrowing insights from the tradition of critical theory can help the field forward. (shrink)

In launching modern economics, Adam Smith paved the way for laissez-faire capitalism, Marxism, and contemporary social science. This book scrutinizes Smith's disparagement of politics and religion to illuminate the subtlety of his rhetoric, the depth of his thought, and the ultimate shortcomings of his project. The author analyzes Smith's ideas on government, justice, human psychology, and international relations, stressing Smith's efforts to elevate wealth at the expense of citizenship and to replace normative political philosophy with historical theorizing and empirical modeling (...) that emphasize economic causes. The book also provides the most comprehensive interpretation available of Smith's views on religion, examining the discrepancies between The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The concluding chapter appraises the demise of communism in light of the Marxian emancipation of economics from politics and religion. (shrink)

Black feminisms offer lenses through which Black women can resist and re-exist under new emancipatory conditions. Part of that work is uncovering roots and routes through which Black women's lives can come to the fore as articulated centers. Such a mandate, I argue, must center love. This article's work, therefore, is to articulate the function of love, as an ethic and a discourse of love as a dialectic space, in the creation of emancipatory spaces for Black women. In particular, this (...) article aims to articulate how a love ethic, as a princple, can be used to support a citational politics for Black women toward a Black feminist reclamatory past, liberatory present, and emancipated future. (shrink)

As a contribution to a critical yet responsive materialist ethics of environments and animals, I reexamine the significance of nature and animals in the critical social theory of Theodor Adorno. In response to the anthropocentric primacy of intersubjective discourse and recognition in recent figures associated with the Frankfurt School, such as Habermas and Honneth, I argue for the ecological import of the aporetic dialectic of nature and society diagnosed in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno’s later works. (...) Adorno’s continuing confrontation with the “domination of nature” traces the tensions between the ideological construction and resistance of “nature” as well as the instrumentalization and implicit disruptive promise of sensuous life. It indicates the material and bodily bonds between human and animal happiness and suffering, the ambiguous role of mimesis in domination and emancipation, and the critical prospect of an unforced and non-coercive freedom toward the object and answerability toward socially and historically mediated yet non-identical natural life. (shrink)

Skirting the Ethical offers highly original readings of six works, each noted for its politico-ethical stance. The first four (Sophocles' Antigone , Plato's Symposium and Republic and Hamann's "Aesthetica in nuce") have a recognized and honored place in the canon. The last two, Sebald's The Emigrants and Jane Campion's film The Piano , are exemplary for our contemporary scene. Nevertheless, the straightforward assumptions about justice, divine and state power, the good, and identity politics that every reader or viewer inevitably comes (...) upon are disrupted when one takes into account the role of language: both the way in which language is talked about and the way in which it performs. What emerges is a non-prescriptive ethics of another order that offers a resistance to power and simplistic conceptualizations of truth, an emancipation from the "must-be" that implies an ever-to-be-renewed renegotiation—a responsability that has much to do with the act of critique or interpretation. (shrink)

The study explains the perception of the nation in the political thinking of Svetozár Hurban Vajanský, which is founded on primordialist starting points and has a holistic character. In this context, the relationship between the nationally conscious elite and the people is analysed in more detail. The ambivalence of Vajanský’s political thinking is evident in the fact that, in many ways, he formally promotes Ľudovít Štúr’s original idea of unity, but, within Slovak political discourse, he promotes the idea of programme (...) uniformity. Subsequently, this becomes a source of cultural and political isolationism. This fact is complemented in parallel by reflecting the primary acculturation importance of the national elite in developing the national consciousness of the population. Vajanský also incorporated the idea of Slavic mutuality into the national emancipation concept of developing Slovak national identity. Its content is in line with Štúr’s ethnic romanticism. The historicist concept of the development of Slavs under Russian protection also appears in his thinking. Vajanský’s Russophilism was, thus, loosely tied to the ideas of Russian Slavophiles and the idealising perspective of the Slavs’ civilisational mission, who were to form a new, more spiritual and culturally advanced, civilisation circle compared with the morally declining nations of the West. (shrink)

G.W.F. Hegel is often vilified for his conservative reactionary philosophy, particularly with respect to the rights of women. Alternatively, tracing a path through G.W.F Hegel's political thought, MacDonald demonstrates that, in fact, the logic of Hegel's argument necessitates the recognition of equal political and civil rights for all human beings. Combining a thoughtful study of Hegel's political thought with close readings of two pivotal works of literature, MacDonald's book shows how the perennial tension between fulfilled, yet diverse, personal lives and (...) stable political communities has historically developed. While Sophocles' Antigone highlights the tension that exists in states that deny the particular interests of their citizens, MacDonald argues that an alternative image, one that admits the freedom of all humans as the grounds for an ethical family and state and one that is consistent with Hegel's thought in both the Phenomenology of Spirit and The Philosophy of Right, is offered in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. In an era of political cynicism and apathy, Finding Freedom seeks to recover the strengths of modern political life, arguing that Hegel's understanding of the true nature of human freedom, one that is based on our willing participation in rationally demonstrable goods, can be grounds for reinvigorating both the family and the political community. (shrink)

Abstract: This article shows how in the Pāli Nikāyas, after having defined Eternalism and Nihilism as two opposed positions, Gotama makes a dialectical use of Eternalism as means to eliminate Nihilism, upheld to be the worst point of view because of its denial of kammic maturation in terms of puñña and pāpa. Assuming, from an Eternalist perspective, that actions have effects also beyond the present life, Gotama underlines the necessity of betting on the validity of moral kammic retribution. Having thus (...) demonstrated the central ethical error of Nihilism, he subtly introduces peculiar Buddhist moral concepts (kusala/akusala) to purify the Eternalist vision from the doctrine of a real existing self (attāvāda) and from the puñña/pāpa dichotomy. We can summarize this dialectical course as follows: Nihilism is pāpa/akusala because it denies kamman, Eternalism is puñña/not-akusala because it upholds kamman from a non-Buddhist perspective, Buddhism is kusala because it admits the law of kamman not centred on a theory of a real existing self (anattāvāda). (shrink)

Are there ethics justifying anti-colonial violence? How and why did the violence and visions of nationalist movements become incorporated by colonial and neo-colonial rule? Using the insurrection by the Malayan Communist Party (1948–1960) as an example, this book argues that resorting to violence sped up the decolonisation of British Malaya by forcing its colonial administration to invent Malay nationalism and pursue ameliorative social policy among the Chinese diaspora community in a manner clearly derived from the Party’s platform. Yet this (...) was not the same as giving the country economic emancipation from the expectations of neo-colonial rule. Violence and Emancipation in Colonial Ideology entertains no warm colonial memories of the cold war years. Confirming Price’s reputation as a plain speaking critic of Empire apologia, this book asks how colonial ideology was considered to be beneath Europe yet desperately needed by it. He faces down nostalgic communities defending an outdated view that “might was right” in South East Asia and that communism failed to contribute to the world that came to be. Using an Althusserian assumption, the book begs the question: if a late colonial state was subjective, then how did it claim a sufficiently objective mantle to rule and how did ideological techniques enable this? (shrink)

This article tacks back towards the idealist side of the argument, in a spirited defence of critical humanism against the radical symmetry of ANT. Vandenberghe argues that the critique of reification and the ethics of emancipation require us to go beyond the `flat ontology' of ANT and its intermediate level of sociotechnical networks towards a more stratified view of social reality, which is able to account for the determining effect of broader generative but invisible structures of domination. Reasserting (...) the categorical distinction between the ontological regions inhabited by humans and nonhumans, he develops a critical opposition between the gift economy, which emphasizes qualitative relations of reciprocity between humans and which tends towards the personalization of things, and the commodity economy, which objectifies things as property, promotes the reification of persons, and turns them into strategically operating `humants'. This model is critically applied to ANT by suggesting that its `fetishist' attribution of social power to nonhumans effectively results from a failure to account for the emergent properties of the broader relational and cultural systems in which they are embedded, and which overdetermine the blackboxed object worlds which ANT has described. (shrink)

If the tragic interpretation of experience is still so current, despite its disastrous ethical consequences, it is because it shapes our subjectivity. Instead of contradicting the ideals of autonomy and freedom, a modern subjectivity based on self-victimization in effect enables them. By embracing subjection to an alienating other (the Law, Power) the autonomous subject protects its sameness from the disruption of real people. Seductions of Fate stages a dialogue between this tragic agent of political emancipation and the unconditional ethical (...) demands it seeks to evade. (shrink)

This paper builds on theoretical developments that view entrepreneurship as emancipation, i.e., entrepreneurial activities as generators of change and pursuit of freedom from perceived constraints. Using a representative data set of 1095 SMEs owned by Indigenous entrepreneurs in Canada, the authors investigate how pursuit of this freedom affects the way entrepreneurs enact several aspects of their ventures and the performance outcomes achieved. Findings reveal how the initial motivations of entrepreneurs lead to distinct business practices, which in turn impact differentially (...) entrepreneurial outcomes. (shrink)

This paper explores Saidiya Hartman's undertheorized account of 'redress' in conversation with the extensive uptake of her work on Black fungibility, subjection, and critiques of emancipation. Although Hartman uses the term in nearly all of her writing, little work has been done to clarify how Hartman conceptualizes redress as a response to the constitution of Black lives as abstract, exchangeable, and disposable. This paper offers an account of how Hartman theorizes redress, showing how it both resists, and acts as (...) a mechanism for, the constitution of Blackness as fungible. Consequently, I argue that Hartman's readers fundamentally skew her thinking in divorcing redress from her other key concepts. (shrink)

The recent Dutch homo-emancipation policy has identified religious communities, particularly within migrant populations, as a core target group in which to make homosexuality more ‘speakable’. In this article we examine the paradoxical silencing tendencies of this ‘speaking out’ policy on queer Muslim organisations in the Netherlands. We undertake this analysis as the Dutch government is perhaps unique in developing an explicit ‘homo-emancipation’ policy and is often looked to as the model for sexuality politics and legal redress in relation (...) to inequalities on the basis of sexual orientation. We highlight how the ‘speakability’ imperative in the Dutch homo-emancipation policy reproduces a paradigmatic, ‘homonormative’ model of an ‘out’ and ‘visible’ queer sexuality that has also come to be embedded in an anti-immigrant and specifically anti-Muslim discourse in the Netherlands. Drawing on the concept of habitus, particularly in the work of Gloria Wekker, we suggest that rather than relying on a ‘speakability’ policy model, queer Muslim sexualities need to be understood in a more nuanced and intersecting way that attends to their lived realities. (shrink)

In search of salvation on the Stroganov estates -- Faith, family, and land after emancipation -- Youth : exemplars of rural socialism -- Elders : Christian ascetics in the Soviet countryside -- New risks and inequalities in the household sector -- Which khoziain? whose moral community? -- Society, culture, and the churching of Sepych -- Separating post-Soviet worlds? : priestly baptisms and priestless funerals.

Andrew Sayer and Dave Elder-Vass are both advocates of ‘moral economy’. To this end, Elder-Vass offers a theory of appropriative practices that enables us to evaluate the enormous variety of forms...

In this paper, I take up the challenge that political activism runs the risk of generating abstract freedoms for oppressed subjects and neglecting the effects of oppression on the development of subjectivity. I argue that a political activism in concert with a companion ethics of advocacy and listening is best positioned to improve the political and economic conditions of individuals as well as ensure that they are able to realize their freedom in meaningful action. In this paper I distinguish (...) political emancipation from human emancipation using the political and ethical writings of Simone de Beauvoir. I then argue that a feminist ethics of advocacy and listening can serve the project of human emancipation as emancipatory advocacy. I then return to Beauvoir to illuminate the dynamics of privilege, risk, and ambiguity in emancipatory advocacy through her own activism and advocacy in the case of Djamila Boupacha and Algerian independence. (shrink)