Current theories of globalization are primarily macro-sociological and focus primarily on globalization as imposing constraints on democratic institutions. While not denying that globalization is such a fact, its explanations can become more critical and practical by also showing how globalizing processes open up new institutional possibilities and new forms of publicity Bohman In order to test these possibilities, this theory must make itself a more open and multiperspectival practice; it must become a global critical theory.
It is in this context that we can press the questions of the normative adequacy of the democratic ideal that has been inherited from modern liberalism. For this reason, they have not asked the question whether such practices are able to sustain a sufficiently robust and cooperative form of inquiry under the new global circumstances of political interdependence. In what respect can it be said that this novel sort of practical and critical social science should be concerned with social facts?
A social scientific praxeology understands facts in relation to human agency rather than independent of it. Pragmatic social science is concerned not merely with elaborating an ideal in convincing normative arguments, but also with its realizability and its feasibility.
In this regard, any political ideal must take into account general social facts if it is to be feasible; but it must also be able to respond to a series of social facts that ground skeptical challenges suggesting that circumstances make such an ideal impossible.
With respect to democracy, these facts include, expertise and the division of labor, cultural pluralism and conflict, social complexity and differentiation, and globalization and increasing social interdependence, to name a few. For this reason, social science is practical to the extent that it is able to show how political ideals that have informed these institutions in question are not only still possible, but also feasible under current conditions or modification of those conditions.
The issue of realizability has to do with a variety of constraints. On the one hand, democracy requires voluntary constraints on action, such as commitments to basic rights and to constitutional limits on political power. Social facts, on the other hand, are non-voluntary constraints, or within our problematic, constraints that condition the scope of the application of democratic principles.
Taken up in a practical social theory oriented to suggesting actions that might realize the ideal of democracy in modern society, social facts no longer operate simply as constraints. This is not yet a complete story. This fact of pluralism thus alters how we are to think of the feasibility of a political ideal, but does not touch on its realizability or possibility. In keeping with the nature and scope of entrenched pluralism, not all actors and groups experience the constraints of pluralism in the same way: from the perspective of some groups, pluralism enables their flourishing; for others, it may be an obstacle.
Social facts related to stability may indeed constrain feasibility without being limits on the possibility or realizability of an ideal as such; in the case of pluralism, for example, democratic political ideals other than liberalism might be possible. When the processes at work in the social fact then begin to outstrip particular institutional feedback mechanisms that maintain it within the institution, then the institution must be transformed if it is to stand in the appropriate relation to the facts that make it feasible and realizable.
All institutions, including democratic ones, entrench some social facts in realizing their conditions of possibility. As with Rawls, for Habermas pluralism and the need for coercive political power make the constitutional state necessary, so that the democratic process of law making is governed by a system of personal, social, and civil rights.
However, Habermas introduces a more fundamental social fact for the possibility and feasibility of democracy: the structural fact of social complexity. This fact of complexity limits political participation and changes the nature of our understanding of democratic institutions. Indeed, this fact makes it such that the principles of democratic self-rule and the criteria of public agreement cannot be asserted simply as the proper norms for all social and political institutions, and this seems ideally suited to understanding how globalization limits the capacity of democracy to entrench itself.
While plausible, this claim lacks empirical evidence. These mediated forms of democracy would in turn affect the conditions that produce social complexity itself and thus stand in a feedback relation to them.
How might this alternative conception of social facts guide a critical and praxeological theory of globalization? When seen in light of the requirements of practical social science and the entrenchment of facts and conditions by institutions, constructivists are right to emphasise how agents produce and maintain social realities, even if not under conditions of their own making.
In this context an important contribution of pragmatism is precisely its interpretation of the practical status of social facts.
They may serve this practical role only if they are seen in interaction with our understanding of the ideals that guide the practices in which such problems emerge, thus where neither fact nor ideal is fixed and neither is given justificatory or theoretical priority.
The debate between Dewey and Lippmann about the public sphere and its role in democracy is precisely praxeological in the sense that I defined the term earlier. Dewey saw the solution in a transformation both of what it is to be a public and of the institutions with which the public interacts.
The question is not just one of current political feasibility, but also of possibility, given that we want to remain committed in some broad sense to democratic principles of self-rule even if not to the set of possibilities provided by current institutions. How do we identify such fundamentally unsettling facts?
Since this is a relatively recent and unsettled debate, through this example we can see Critical Theory in the making. Whatever the specific form these assume in future institutions, the usual arguments for political cosmopolitanism are relatively simple despite the fact that the social scientific analyses employed in them are highly complex and empirically differentiated in their factual claims.
In discussions of theories of globalization, the fact of global interdependence refers to the unprecedented extent, intensity, and speed of social interactions across borders, encompassing diverse dimensions of human conduct from trade and cultural exchange to migration Held, et al The inference from these facts of interdependence is that existing forms of democracy within the nation-state must be transformed and that institutions ought to be established that solve problems that transcend national boundaries Held , 98— Thus, globalization is taken to be a macro-sociological, aggregative fact that constrains the realization of democracy so long as the proper congruence between decision makers and decision takers is lacking.
Globalization is thus taken as a constraint on democracy as it is realized in existing liberal representative systems. A pragmatic interpretation of social facts in this way encourages us to see globalization as Janus-faced, as an obstacle and as a resource for the realization of democratic ideals. This sort of theory sees globalization not as a unitary but rather as a multidimensional process.
In some domains such as global financial markets, globalization is profoundly uneven and deeply stratified reinforcing hierarchies and distributive inequalities. Inequalities of access to and control over aspects of globalizing processes may reflect older patterns of subordination and order, even while the process produces new ones by excluding some communities from financial markets and by making others more vulnerable to its increased volatility Hurrell and Woods If these descriptions are correct, the fact of globalization is a new sort of social fact whose structure of enablement and constraint is not easily captured at the aggregative level.
It is even experienced in contradictory ways looking at its consequences and impacts that differ across various domains and at various locations. Institutions can only manage the problems of globalization in ways that consider the interests of everyone by having mechanisms that ensure that the full range of perspectives is available for inquiry.
This requires that international financial institutions extent their forms of inquiry to include issues such as the social disintegration and domination produced by their policies Rodrik , Woods One further question about the fact of globalization must be raised in order to understand the inherent possibilities for democracy in it.
Even if reversing such processes were possible, it is not feasible in any short time span and under the democratic constraints. This is not to say that globalization in its current form is somehow permanent or unalterable if we want to realize democratic ideals. Indeed, just how globalization will continue, and under what legitimate normative constraints, become the proper questions for democratic politics, as citizens and public vigorously interact with those institutions that make globalization a deeply entrenched and temporally stable social fact.
However entrenched, the social fact of globalization still remains open to democratic reconstruction, should creative reinterpretation of democracy come about. In the next section, I examine recent debates among Critical Theorists about the significance of the European Union as a model for a genuine transformation of democracy. The analysis thus far has taken a robust ideal of democracy for granted consisting of self-rule by the public deliberation of free and equal citizens—the ideal of deliberative democracy that informs both pragmatism and Critical Theory Bohman Given the uneven and potentially contradictory consequences of globalization, it seems clear that current democratic institutions themselves cannot be responsive to all the dimensions of domination and subordination that are possible considering the scale and intensity of interconnectedness.
What are the alternatives? It is not just a matter of exercising an institutional imagination within broadly understood democratic norms and ideals. Informed by democratic ideals of non-domination, the practical knowledge needed to promote the democratising of uneven and hierarchical social relations requires an empirical analysis of current transformations and its embedded possibilities.
The democratic ideal of autonomy leads David Held and others to emphasise the emerging structures of international law that produce a kind of binding power of collective decisions. Others look to ways of reforming the structures of representation of current international institutions Pogge , Habermas Still others look to the emergence of various institutions in the European Union EU to discuss the trend toward international constitutionalism or supranational deliberation.
According to the sort of plurality of perspectives endorsed by a pragmatist philosophy of social science, a historical account of the emergence of single and multiple institutions would be helpful. Unbundling sovereignty would lead to new political possibilities, including the re-articulation of international political space in a new way that cannot be anticipated in dominant theories of international relations.
Such an account also applies to the theory of practical knowledge that might inform reflection on the possibilities of democracy in an era of uneven globalization.
The positive conditions for such an extension of current political possibilities already exist in the fact of interdependence—the emergence of greater social interaction among citizens who participate in vibrant interaction across transnational civil society and within emerging global public spheres. However important giving greater powers to the European Parliament may be, parliamentary politics at best serves a mediating role among transnational and national institutions and is not the sole means to democratisation Habermas Given that such institutions cannot easily be scaled up and retain their full democratic character, it is necessary to look to a different institutional level: to the possibility of new forms of social inquiry that may be developing in the problem-solving mechanisms of the European Union.
How might new forms of inquiry emerge that are able to accommodate a greater number of perspectives and also remain democratic? Here we need again to distinguish between first- and second-order forms of deliberation, where the latter develops in order to accommodate an emergent public with new perspectives and interests.
Dewey sees the normal, problem-solving functioning of democratic institutions as based on robust interaction between publics and institutions within a set of constrained alternatives. When the institutional alternatives implicitly address a different public than is currently constituted by evolving institutional practice and its consequences, the public may act indirectly and self-referentially by forming a new public with which the institutions must interact.
This interaction initiates a process of democratic renewal in which publics organise and are organised by new emerging institutions with a different alternative set of political possibilities.
This account of democratic learning and innovation seems not to be limited by the scope of the institutions, even as the potential for domination also increases under current arrangements.
What sort of public sphere could play such a normative role? But the other side of this generalization is a requirement for communication that crosses social domains: such a generalization is necessary precisely because the public sphere has become less socially and culturally homogeneous and more internally differentiated than its early modern form Habermas Instead of relying on the intrinsic features of the medium to expand communicative interaction, networks that are global in scope become publics only with the development and expansion of transnational civil society.
The creation of such a civil society is a slow and difficult process that requires the highly reflexive forms of communication and boundary crossing and accountability typical of developed public spheres.
On the basis of their common knowledge of violations of publicity, their members will develop the capacities of public reason to cross and negotiate boundaries and differences between persons, groups, and cultures.
In such boundary-crossing publics, the speed, scale, and intensity of communicative interaction facilitated by networks such as the Internet provides a positive and enabling condition for democratic deliberation and thus creates a potential space for cosmopolitan democracy. But if the way to do this is through disaggregated networks such as the Internet rather than mass media, then we cannot expect that the global public sphere will no longer exhibit features of the form of the national public sphere.
Rather, it will be a public of publics, of disaggregated networks embedded in a variety of institutions rather than an assumed unified national public sphere. The emergence of transnational public spheres is informative for the practical goals of a critical theory of globalization.
Once we examine the potential ways in which the Internet can expand the features of communicative interaction, whether or not the Internet is a public sphere is a practical question of possibility rather than a theoretical question about the fact of the matter.
It depends not only on which institutions shape its framework but also on how participants contest and change these institutions and on how they interpret the Internet as a public space. It depends on the mediation of agency, not on technology. With the proliferation of non-governmental organizations NGOs and other forms of transnational civil society organization, it is plausible to expect that two different and interacting levels of multiperspectival innovation may emerge: first, new institutions such as the European Union that are more adapted to multiple jurisdictions and levels of governance; and, second, a vibrant transnational civil society that produces public spheres around various institutions with the goal of making their forms of inquiry more transparent, accessible and open to a greater variety of actors and perspectives.
This approach does not limit the sources of the democratic impulse to transnational civil society. Rather, the better alternative is to reject both bottom-up and top-down approaches in favour of vigorous interaction between publics and institutions as the ongoing source of democratization and institutional innovation. According to a pragmatically inspired democratic experimentalism, attempts at democratisation and reform need not wait for publics to emerge; they can be constructed in various practices.
Consultative NGOs may generally become too intertwined with institutions and thus do not generatively entrench their own conditions in this way. This practical difficulty is evident in the official civil society organizations of the European Union that fail to promote public deliberation.
Even when informed by democratic aims, this form of politics cannot capture the complex interrelationships of civil society, the state and the market, especially given the background of inequalities and asymmetries that operate in processes of globalization. Apart from powerful corporate actors in civil society, NGOs from economically advantaged regions possess significant resources to influence and shape the formation of civil society in other contexts.
A critical theory of such activity asks about the possibility of a strong connection between their powers in civil society with market forces Silliman Here we can include a variety of experiments, from participatory budgets to citizen boards and juries that have a variety of decision-making powers. Properly empowered and self-consciously constructed, mini-publics offer a strategy to get beyond the dilemma of insider consultation and outsider contestation that is a structural feature of civil society activity in currently existing international institutions.
Since self-consciously created minipublics seek to include all relevant stakeholders, they do not rely on representation as the mode of communicating interests, or even the inclusion of well-organized actors as a way of achieving effective implementation.
Instead they open up a directly deliberative process within the institution that includes as many perspectives as possible and can be repeated when necessary. The minipublic is then an institutionally constructed intermediary, although it could act in such a way as to become an agent for the creation of a larger public with normative powers.
In this capacity, minipublics may become open and expandable spaces for democratic experimentation. While many are issue or domain specific, such experiments often become models for democratic governance in dispersed and diverse polities.
As Cohen and Rogers put it, the more specific and episodic practices aim at mutual benefits through improved coordination, experimental deliberative practices tied to larger political projects may redistribute power and advantage and in this way secure the conditions of democracy more generally Cohen and Rogers , The same point could be made about taking existing democratic institutions as the proper model for democratization.
To look only at the constraints of size in relation to a particular form of political community begs the question of whether or not there are alternative linkages between democracy and the public sphere that are not simply scaled up. Such linkages might be more decentralized and polycentric than the national community requires. For a nation state to be democratic it requires a certain sort of public sphere sufficient to create a strong public via its connections to parliamentary debate.
A transnational and thus polycentric and pluralist community, such as the European Union, requires a different sort of public sphere in order to promote sufficient democratic deliberation.
Without a single location of public power, a unified public sphere becomes an impediment to democracy rather than an enabling condition for mass participation in decisions at a single location of authority. The problem for an experimental institutional design of directly deliberative democracy is to create precisely the appropriate feedback relation between disaggregated publics and such a polycentric decision making process. The lesson for a critical theory of globalization is to see the extension of political space and the redistribution of political power not only as a constraint similar to complexity but also as an open field of opportunities for innovative, distributive, and multiperspectival forms of publicity and democracy.
The central and still open questions for such a practically oriented social science are the following: what available forms of praxis are able to promote the transformations that could lead to new forms of democracy? What sort of practical knowledge is needed to make this possible and how might this knowledge be stabilised in institutionalised forms of democratic inquiry? What are the possibilities and opportunities for democracy at a higher level of aggregation that globalization makes possible?
How might the public sphere be realized at the global level? The argument here suggests that such inquiry and institutions must go beyond single perspective understandings of democracy that dominate national political life as well as the various administrative techne that are common in the international sphere. A critical praxeology of realizing norms in multiperspectival institutions might add that it is also a reflexive question of putting such organization in the larger context of a project of human emancipation.
Such an interactive account of publics and institutions gives a plausible practical meaning to the extending of the project of democracy to the global level. It also models in its own form of social science the mode of inquiry that this and other publics may employ in creating and assessing the possibilities for realizing democracy.
A critical theory of globalization does not only point out the deficits of current practices, but shows the potential for properly organized publics to create new ones.
Since the new practices need not be modeled on the old ones, it is not a theory of democracy as such, but of democratization. In facing the challenges of new social facts, Critical Theory remains a vital philosophical tradition in normative disciplines of social and political philosophy.
Furthermore, this vitality is enhanced when it considers a range of democratic claims not discussed here, all of which equally challenge the fundamental frameworks of conceptions of democracy, justice, and their interrelationship: these include the struggles of aboriginal peoples, the disabled, women, and more.
As new forms of critical theory emerge related to racism, sexism, and colonialism, reflective social agents have transformed these same democratic ideals and practices in the interest of emancipation.
In entrenching new social facts, agents transform the ideals themselves as well as their institutional form. This critical and practical orientation gives rise to three different questions about critical social inquiry. First, does Critical Theory suggest a distinctive form of social inquiry?
Second, what sort of knowledge does such inquiry provide in order to provide insight into social circumstances and justify social criticism of current ideals and institutions? Finally, what sort of verification does critical inquiry require? In light of the answers to these questions on the practical, democratic, and multiperspectival interpretation defended here, it is likely that Critical Theory is no longer a unique approach.
Methodologically, it becomes more thoroughly pluralistic. Politically, it loses its capital letters as the aims and struggles of the age of globalization become more diverse and not automatically connected by the commitment to any particular holistic social theory.
Given its own democratic aims, it would be hard to justify any other interpretation. In a period in which philosophy cooperates with empirical sciences and disciplines, Critical Theory offers an approach to distinctly normative issues that cooperates with the social sciences in a nonreductive way. Its domain is inquiry into the normative dimension of social activity, in particular how actors employ their practical knowledge and normative attitudes from complex perspectives in various sorts of contexts.
It also must consider social facts as problematic situations from the point of view of variously situated agents. This kind of normative practical knowledge is thus reflexive and finds its foothold in those ongoing, self-transforming normative enterprises such as democracy that are similarly reflexive in practice.
By discussing democracy in this way, I have also tried to show just how deep the connections are between it and critical social science: critical theories are not democratic theories, but their practical consequences are assessed and verified in democratic practice and solved by inquiry into better democratic practice.
Perhaps one of the more pernicious forms of ideology now is embodied in the appeal of the claim that there are no alternatives to present institutions.
In this age of diminishing expectations, one important role that remains for the social scientifically informed, and normatively oriented democratic critic is to offer novel alternatives and creative possibilities in place of the defeatist claim that we are at the end of history.
That would not only mean the end of inquiry, but also the end of democracy. Critical Theory First published Tue Mar 8, Texts associated with the Frankfurt School focused their critique on the centralization of economic, social, and political control that was transpiring around them.
Key texts from this period include:. Over the years, many social scientists and philosophers who rose to prominence after the Frankfurt School have adopted the goals and tenets of critical theory. We can recognize critical theory today in many feminist theories and approaches to conducting social science.
It is also found in critical race theory , cultural theory, gender, and queer theory, as well as in media theory and media studies. Updated by Nicki Lisa Cole, Ph. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data.
Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. The political philosophy of the Frankfurt School. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Held, D. Introduction to critical theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jay, M. Kompridis, N. Critique and disclosure: Critical theory between past and future. Wiggershaus, R. The Frankfurt School: Its history, theories and political significance. His most important treatise, the Neue oder anthropologische Kritik der Vernunft 2nd ed.
The manifold of sense, which plays so important a part in the critical theory of knowledge, is left in an obscure and perplexed position. The system of principles which may be deduced from the consideration of the mode in which understanding and sense are united by productive imagination is the positive result of the critical theory of knowledge, and some of its features are remarkable enough to deserve attention.
All rights reserved.
0コメント