Looking back from somewhere: reflections on what remains ‘critical’ in critical theory

2007 ◽  
Vol 33 (S1) ◽  
pp. 25-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
FRIEDRICH KRATOCHWIL
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
World Order ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
The World ◽  
Analytical Tools ◽  
Looking Back ◽  
Blind Spots

ABSTRACTThis article revisits some of the theoretical debates within the field of IR since Ashley and Cox challenged the mainstream. But in so doing it attempts also to show that the proposed alternatives have their own blind spots that are subjected in the second part to discursive criticism. Neither Ashley’s celebration of the wisdom of old realists nor their ‘silence’ on economics, nor the notion of ‘internationalisation of the state’ and of the world order are adequate for understanding politics in the era of globalisation. Instead, a critical theory has to examine the political projects that were engendered by the Hobbesian conception of order and rationality. Highlighting the disconnect between our present political vocabularies and the actual political practices, I argue that a critical theory has not only to ‘criticise’ existing approaches but has to rethink and re-conceptualise praxis, which is ill served by the analytical tools which are imported to this field from ‘theory’.

The Indirectly Political Word of the Church

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. DeJonge
Keyword(s):  
Word Type ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
The State ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
The Political ◽  
The World ◽  
Type 3 ◽  
The Church

This chapter continues the examination of Bonhoeffer’s first phase of resistance through an exposition of “The Church and the Jewish Question,” turning now to the modes of resistance proper to the church’s preaching office. Because such resistance involves the church speaking against the state, it appears to stand in contradiction with Bonhoeffer’s suggestion earlier in the essay that the church should not speak out against the state. This is in fact not a contradiction but rather the coherent expression of the political vision as outlined in the first several chapters of this book, which requires that the church criticize the state under certain circumstances but not others. The specific form of word examined here is the indirectly political word (type 3 resistance) by which the church reminds the messianic state of its mandate to preserve the world with neither “too little” nor “too much” order.

The Poetic and the Political in Valery Podoroga’s Analytical Anthropology

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (5) ◽  
pp. 50
Author(s):  
Oleg Aronson
Keyword(s):  
Special Kind ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Analytical Tools

The article is devoted to an analysis of the creative work of the Russian philosopher Valery Podoroga. It focuses on the special discipline he created, namely, “analytical anthropology”, and the book “Anthropograms”, in which Valery Podoroga sets out the basic principles and analytical tools of his philosophical work. Examining the books of the philosopher that preceded the creation of analytical anthropology and those that were written later, it is possible to single out two important lines of his research. First, the philosophy of literature and second, research in the field of the political. Podoroga’s understanding of literature is broader than that of a cultural practice or a social institution. For him, it is the space of the corporal experience of contact with the world, in which the affective aspect of thinking is realized. This line of analysis points to the “poetic” dimension of the experience of thinking, since the emphasis here is on what Jakobson called the “poetic function of language”, its orientation toward itself. It is precisely the literary aspect that becomes important when analyzing the texts of philosophers (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger); however, what is even more important is that in the very experience of fiction Podoroga is trying to find new means for philosophy. His “poetic line” is closely connected with the poetics of space (Bachelard) and the phenomenology of the body (Merleau-Ponty, Henry). It is the combination of poetics and phenomenology that allows Podoroga to overcome both the orientation of poetics exclusively toward language and the categorical apparatus of philosophy. The main result of Valery Podoroga’s work is the creation of an “anthropogram”, a special kind of scheme in which the action of the Work (a literary work, but not only) is immanent to the dynamics of the world. Is it possible to create such anthropograms outside the field of literature? Podoroga does not specify. The article attempts to show how Podoroga’s ways of working with literary texts correlate with his works dealing with the technologies of power and violence, transforming separate political and ethical terms into anthropograms, that is, forms of thought immanent to life itself.

IR, the Critic, and the World: From Reifying the Discipline to Decolonising the University

2020 ◽  
pp. 030582982093706
Author(s):  
Isaac Kamola
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
Disciplinary Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
The University

Why does IR scholarship seem so resistant to travel into other disciplinary spaces? To answer this question, I look at the tendency for scholars within our discipline to talk to the discipline, about the discipline, and for the discipline. We obsess over ‘IR’ and, in doing so, reify IR as a thing. I turn towards Edward Said’s arguments about the worldliness of texts, and how reification shapes how ideas travel. I then provide two illustrations of how scholars have reified IR as a thing: Robert Cox’s approach to critical theory and Amitav Acharya’s call for a ‘Global IR’. In both cases, contrary to expectation, the authors reify IR as a thing, portraying the discipline as distinct from the world. IR is treated as something with agency, ignoring how disciplinary knowledge is produced within worldly institutions. I conclude by looking at three strategies for studying worldly relations in ways that refuse to reify the discipline: showing disloyalty to the discipline, engaging the political economy of higher education, and seeking to decolonise the university. Rather than reifying IR, these strategies help us to engage our scholarly work in a way that prioritises worldly critical engagements within our disciplinary community, and the world.

American Political Development from Citizens' Perspective: Tracking Federal Government's Presence in Individual Lives over Time

2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne Mettler ◽  
Andrew Milstein
Keyword(s):  
Political Development ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
State Building ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Political Roles ◽  
Analytical Tools ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Over Time

Although scholars of American political development (APD) have helped transform many aspects of the study of U.S. politics over the last quarter-century, they have barely begun to use the powerful analytical tools of this approach to elucidate the relationship between government and citizens. APD research has probed deeply into the processes of state-building and the creation and implementation of specific policies, yet has given little attention to how such development affects the lives of individuals and the ways in which they relate to government. Studies routinely illuminate how policies influence the political roles of elites and organized groups, but barely touch on how the state shapes the experiences and responses of ordinary individuals. As a result, we know little about how governance has influenced citizenship over time or how those changes have, in turn, affected politics.

The Plurality of States and the World Order of Reason

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergio Dellavalle
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Social Order ◽  
World Order ◽  
The State ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

This chapter argues that Hegel can be regarded as the philosopher who was the first to pave the way to a new paradigm of order and, thus, also to a new idea of the relation between the state and international law. Hegel would not only conceive order as a ‘system’—which emerges clearly from the investigation of the deep connection between his interpretation of international law and relations and the broader context of his philosophy—but this ‘system’ would also be something new within the horizon of the patterns of social order. Indeed, two elements of a new paradigm are at least sketched in Hegel’s philosophy: the polyarchic setting of order, and its dialectic (or maybe even communicative) understanding.

Understanding the State in South Korea

1992 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 512-531 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES COTTON
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Political System ◽  
World System ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Character ◽  
Authoritarian State ◽  
The World ◽  
The 1960S

South Korea cannot be seen as an example of the bureaucratic-authoritarian state type. Neither its position in the world system nor its industrialization strategy can be used to give a sufficient explanation of its political and social character. Although these factors have played a part, particular historical, political, and cultural circumstances have permitted the state to enjoy a degree of autonomy during the period of rapid social and economic transformation from the 1960s to the 1980s. The determinants and character of the transition to democratization generally support this analysis, but also indicate that limits exist to the degree of liberalization to be expected in the political system.

Policy Studies, Development, and Political Anthropology

1975 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell Owusu
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Method ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Anthropology ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
African Politics ◽  
Policy Studies ◽  
Research Results ◽  
The World

Policy research involves two acts of translation: translation of the problem from the world of reality and policy into the world of scientific method, and then a translation of the research results back into the world of reality and policy.1Since the political scientist, David Easton, commented critically in 1959 on the state of the study of politics by anthropologists,2 many interesting changes have taken place in the analyses of African politics – in fact, of politics of non-western societies in general.

scholarly journals In search of a "new" Sovietology, new Post-Sovietology or Central Asian Studies…

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-85
Author(s):  
Zarema Shaimardanova
Keyword(s):  
World Order ◽  
Natural Phenomenon ◽  
The Political ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Processes ◽  
Independent States ◽  
Historical Comparative ◽  
New Independent States

The Euro-American, Kazakh and Russian studies naturally raised and are still raising the question of the future Sovietology, Post-Sovietology and even Post-Post- Sovietology caused by the USSR collapse and understanding the need to rethink the theoretical and methodological foundations to study the New Independent States / CIS as a whole and in the Central Asian region, in particular. Sovietology could not adequately reflect the changed reality. The author demonstrates the consistency and inconsistency of sovietology concerning the question about Kazakhstan history, as colonization, russification, sovietization and etc. The socio-economic development of independent Kazakhstan evaluated by foreign researchers was taken as an example in order to show traits of Sovietology inherited earlier. Guided by the inequality of the world order and sovietology experience, the objective and impartial theoretical and methodological basis to study CIS space is required. Otherwise, methodological inconsistency of Sovietology and PostSovietology in explanation and understanding of the political and socio-cultural processes in the territory of CIS will be a natural phenomenon. The "special way" of study, neoinstitutional approach, historical, comparative and pluralist approaches are offered on the basis of international scholars' analysis.

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