Justification and Critique E-Book

Rainer Forst

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 417

Beschreibung

Rainer Forst develops a critical theory capable of deciphering the deficits and potentials inherent in contemporary political reality. This calls for a perspective which is immanent to social and political practices and at the same time transcends them. Forst regards society as a whole as an 'order of justification' comprising complexes of different norms referring to institutions and corresponding practices of justification. The task of a 'critique of relations of justification', therefore, is to analyse such legitimations with regard to their validity and genesis and to explore the social and political asymmetries leading to inequalities in the 'justification power' which enables persons or groups to contest given justifications and to create new ones. Starting from the concept of justification as a basic social practice, Forst develops a theory of political and social justice, human rights and democracy, as well as of power and of critique itself. In so doing, he engages in a critique of a number of contemporary approaches in political philosophy and critical theory. Finally, he also addresses the question of the utopian horizon of social criticism.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Dedication

Title page

Copyright page

Sources

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: On the Idea of a Critique of Relations of Justification

A Reflexive Political Philosophy

Critical Theory

Noumenal Power

Outline of the Argument

Notes

Part I: Radical Justice

1: Two Pictures of Justice

Notes

2: The Justification of Human Rights and the Basic Right to Justification: A Reflexive Approach

Notes

3: The Normative Order of Justice and Peace

Notes

Part II: Justification, Recognition, and Critique

4: The Ground of Critique: On the Concept of Human Dignity in Social Orders of Justification

Notes

5: First Things First: Redistribution, Recognition, and Justification

Notes

6: “To Tolerate Means to Insult”: Toleration, Recognition, and Emancipation

Notes

Part III: Beyond Justice

7: The Injustice of Justice: Normative Dialectics According to Ibsen, Cavell, and Adorno

Notes

8: The Republicanism of Fear and of Redemption: On the Topicality of Hannah Arendt's Political Theory

1    “New Republicanism”

2    A New World

3    Ambivalences

4    What Remains

Notes

9: Utopia and Irony: On the Normativity of the Political Philosophy of “Nowhere”

1    A Radical Tradition

2    Political Perfectionism

3    Reflection, Hyperbole, Irony

4    More's

Utopia

5    Inverse Worlds

6    More (and Less)

7    Double Normativity

Notes

References

Index

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Start Reading

Preface

CHAPTER 1

Index

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For Jürgen Habermas

First published in German as Kritik der Rechtfertigungsverhältnisse © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2011

This English edition © Polity Press, 2014

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5228-3 (hardback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5229-0 (paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9478-8 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9385-9 (mobi)

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Sources

Chapter 2: “The Justification of Human Rights and the Basic Right to Justification: A Reflexive Approach,” in: Ethics 120, 2010, pp. 711–40.

Chapter 4: “The Ground of Critique: On the Concept of Human Dignity in Social Orders of Justification,” translated by Ciaran Cronin, Philosophy and Social Criticism 37, 2011, pp. 965–76.

Chapter 5: “First Things First: Redistribution, Recognition, and Justification,” in: European Journal of Political Theory 6, 2007, pp. 291–304. Reprinted in: Kevin Olson (ed.), Nancy Fraser, Adding Insult to Injury. Debating Redistribution, Recognition, and Representation, London: Verso, 2008, pp. 310–26, and in: Danielle Petherbridge (ed.), Axel Honneth: Critical Essays, Leiden: Brill, 2011, pp. 303–19.

Chapter 6: “ ‘To Tolerate Means to Insult’: Toleration, Recognition, and Emancipation,” in: Bert van den Brink and David Owen (eds.), Recognition and Power, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 215–37.

Chapter 7: “The Injustice of Justice: Normative Dialectics According to Ibsen, Cavell, and Adorno,” translated by Mario Wenning, in: Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 28, 2007, pp. 39–52.

The articles have been slightly edited for the present volume. Permission to reprint these texts is gratefully acknowledged.

Preface and Acknowledgments

Someone who has so much to say about justification should be able to offer a brief explanation of what the present book is about. Building on my earlier writings, it represents an attempt to develop the program of a theory of justification further – first when it comes to clarifying basic concepts of political philosophy and, in addition, as regards its implications for critical theory and the possible limits of a mode of thought which accords central importance to discursive justice. The guiding idea throughout is that the concept of justification is reflexive in nature and that political philosophy must build on this insight in order to link theory and practice in the right way and to avoid the blind alleys into which it all too often stumbles.

These texts were written over the past years during what was a very active period for me at the University of Frankfurt. An exceptionally rich research context developed especially as a result of the funding of the research cluster “The Formation of Normative Orders” within the framework of the Excellence Initiative of the German Federal and State Governments, but also of further new institutions such as the Centre for Advanced Studies “Justitia Amplificata” (funded by the German Research Foundation) and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in Bad Homburg, for the establishment of which I was also jointly responsible. This context is both rooted in Frankfurt and truly international and I am indebted to it for numerous stimuli and insights. I am especially grateful for this to the colleagues with whom I collaborated in directing these institutions, namely, Klaus Günther for the Cluster, Stefan Gosepath for the Centre for Advanced Studies and Spiros Simitis for the Institute for Advanced Studies. In this connection, my Tuesday research colloquium on political theory, whose contribution to the development of my thought has been inestimable, must also be mentioned. Here I would like to express my sincere collective gratitude to the members and guests of this colloquium.

I presented the contributions to this volume (in different versions) on so many occasions in so many different places that I cannot cite them in detail here. But I would like to take the opportunity to thank those who have helped me to avoid certain mistakes through detailed commentaries: Amy Allen, Joel Anderson, Richard Arneson, Ayelet Banai, Mahmoud Bassiouni, Ken Baynes, Seyla Benhabib, Richard Bernstein, Samantha Besson, Bert van den Brink, Allen Buchanan, Eva Buddeberg, Simon Caney, Jean Cohen, Julian Culp, Christopher Daase, Franziska Dübgen, the late Ronald Dworkin, Eva Erman, Dorothea Gädeke, Raymond Geuss, Eva Gilmer, Casiano Hacker-Cordón, Mattias Iser, Rahel Jaeggi, Stefan Kadelbach, Andreas Kalyvas, Anja Karnein, Regina Kreide, Chandran Kukathas, Mattias Kumm, Tony Laden, Heike List, John McCormick, Christoph Menke, Darrel Moellendorf, Harald Müller, Sankar Muthu, Thomas Nagel, Peter Niesen, Dmitri Nikulin, David Owen, Philip Pettit, Thomas Pogge, Henry Richardson, Michel Rosenfeld, Stefan Rummens, Martin Saar, Andy Sabl, Rainer Schmalz-Bruns, Thomas M. Schmidt, Martin Seel, Ian Shapiro, Seana Shiffrin, Peter Siller, John Tasioulas, Laurent Thévenot, James Tully, Jeremy Waldron, Michael Walzer, Melissa Williams, and Michael Zürn.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to my translator Ciaran Cronin for his careful and judicious translation of the texts that had not yet appeared in English; as always, I benefited from his philosophical expertise. I am grateful to Sonja Sickert and Marius Piwonka for their extremely valuable work in preparing the manuscript. And I would like to thank John Thompson for the enthusiasm with which he endorsed the adoption of the book into the program of Polity Press and I am extremely grateful to Sarah Lambert for her professionalism in transforming the manuscript into a book.

In addition to my colleagues named above, I would like to make special mention of a few with whom I have been associated through discussions over many years which have exercised an enduring influence on my thought and for which I am most grateful – namely, Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth, and Charles Larmore.

To my family, Mechthild, Sophie, and Jonathan, I owe so much loving support and so much inspiration that I will not even attempt to find adequate words for it here.

When it comes to my intellectual development, I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to my academic teacher Jürgen Habermas, on whose judgment I am still able to rely, and whose thought has deeply shaped mine even where I see things somewhat differently. I dedicate this book to him.

Introduction:On the Idea of a Critique of Relations of Justification

A Reflexive Political Philosophy

Since Plato's Republic, political philosophy has posed the question of the principles for a legitimate or just exercise of political rule. The proper methodological approach to answering this question, however, remains a matter of controversy. Is the task to discover or invent an “ideal theory” employing the method of rational construction, and then to ask how the resulting abstract moral principles can be “implemented” in practice? Or should one start from the reality of concrete political contexts, reject normative cloud cuckoo conceptions and confine oneself to what is possible and acceptable here and now in view of deep-seated interest conflicts? This controversy raises a host of philosophical questions – concerning the possibility of universalistic principles, the power of reason, the historicity of norms, the relation between morality and politics and, finally, the critical function of political philosophy. All too often, however, this controversy remains captive to stale and unproductive oppositions and the repertoire of critiques of the one side by the other gradually becomes used up.1

The approach I propose here seeks to avoid these deadlocks. I begin with the central question of the justification of political rule and give it a reflexive turn: Who actually poses this question and who has the authority to answer it? It is time that we recalled the political point of political philosophy and conceived of the philosophical question of justification as a practical question and radicalized, while at the same time contextualizing, the idea of justification. For the political question of justification is not posed in an abstract but always in a concrete way, namely, by historical agents who are no longer satisfied with the justifications for the normative order to which they are subjected. The question of political philosophy is their question. From the perspective of those who raise this question as a question of justice, the justification on which everything turns is one which they can accept individually and jointly as free and equal persons, where their acceptance or rejection are themselves in turn governed by specific norms. In my view, the key point is to reconstruct the norms and principles contained in this practical demand for and claim to justification. For the dynamic of justification at stake here is as much a concrete and historically situated one as it is one that exhibits a general structure in need of philosophical clarification – in the first instance with regard to the principle of justification itself that is at work here. At its origin is the social conflict which arises as a result of a political “No.”