Constantinian Toleration

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 296-306
Author(s):  
Vincent Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Christian Ethics ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
Marginalized Community

Recent secular theorists of toleration have turned to Christian thought as a resource to overcome problems faced by secular-liberal accounts of toleration. This review essay examines three such projects, one in the tradition of Thomistic virtue ethics, another in the tradition of Frankfurt School critical theory, and another in political theory. While Christian ethics can learn from the methods and theoretical machinery deployed in these studies, each study assumes that the question of toleration is posed from a position of power and privilege. The essay asks what it might mean to consider toleration from the perspective of a marginalized community—like the early Christians.

Human Nature, Non-human Nature, and Needs

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Biro
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Instrumental Rationality ◽  
Communicative Rationality ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Needs

This chapter assesses the relevance of Frankfurt School critical theory for contemporary environmental political theory. Early Frankfurt School thinkers such as Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse developed a critique of instrumental rationality that provides a powerful framework for understanding the domination of nature in modernity, including an inability to articulate and defend human needs. Habermas subsequently attempts to mitigate this totalizing critique, countering instrumental rationality with a focus on communicative rationality. This Habermasian turn both provides new openings and forecloses certain possibilities for environmental political theory; deliberative democracy is emphasized, but with a renewed commitment to anthropocentrism. The chapter then explores whether Habermas’s communicative turn could be “greened,” either through an expansion of the subjects of communicative rationality, or by critically examining the extent to which human beings themselves can articulate their genuine needs.

The History and Fulfilment of Western Rationality: Martin Jay’s The Eclipse of Reason

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-103
Author(s):  
Robert Doran
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Interpretative Approach

Abstract This review-essay examines Martin Jay’s The Eclipse of Reason: On Late Critical Theory with a view toward understanding the stakes of its interpretative approach to intellectual history. I show how Jay's book aims to provide much more than a mere history of reason (although it does this admirably), for it seeks to legitimate and resuscitate an idea of reason in the face of more than one hundred years of anti-rationalist thought. I contend that Jay offers Habermas’s intersubjective rationality (“late Critical Theory”) as both an alternative to, but also in some sense a continuation of, the dominant forms of subjectivist and objectivist rationality Jay documents in his book. According to the logic of Jay’s account, then, Habermas represents in some sense the fulfillment of the history of Western rationality. My only critique of an otherwise excellent and fascinating study is that Jay’s Frankfurt School-centric narrative effectively inhibits a larger discussion of Habermas’s relevance to recent and current debates about the direction of philosophy. An elaboration specifically of the post-structuralist critique of reason would have greatly enhanced our understanding of the place of "late Critical Theory" in the intellectual landscape of our time.

Critical International Theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Devetak
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
International Theory ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Civil Government

Whether inspired by the Frankfurt School or Antonio Gramsci, the impact of critical theory on the study of international relations has grown considerably since its advent in the early 1980s. This book offers the first intellectual history of critical international theory. Richard Devetak approaches this history by locating its emergence in the rising prestige of theory and the theoretical persona. As theory’s prestige rose in the discipline of international relations it opened the way for normative and metatheoretical reconsiderations of the discipline and the world. The book traces the lines of intellectual inheritance through the Frankfurt School to the Enlightenment, German idealism, and historical materialism, to reveal the construction of a particular kind of intellectual persona: the critical international theorist who has mastered reflexive, dialectical forms of social philosophy. In addition to the extensive treatment of critical theory’s reception and development in international relations, the book recovers a rival form of theory that originates outside the usual inheritance of critical international theory in Renaissance humanism and the civil Enlightenment. This historical mode of theorising was intended to combat metaphysical encroachments on politics and international relations and to prioritise the mundane demands of civil government over the self-reflective demands of dialectical social philosophies. By proposing contextualist intellectual history as a form of critical theory, Critical International Theory: An Intellectual History defends a mode of historical critique that refuses the normative temptations to project present conceptions onto an alien past, and to abstract from the offices of civil government.

Anarchist, Antisemit, Aufklärer? Vier Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Nietzsches Philosophie und Politik

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 296-311
Author(s):  
Paul Stephan
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
Political Commitments ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract Four new publications provide an overview of the relationship between Nietzsche’s philosophical thought and his political commitments. Together they highlight the true complexity of Nietzsche’s politics, since some of his ideas can be adapted to anarchist and right-wing positions as much as, for instance, to Frankfurt School critical theory. At the same time, these contributions underscore the limitations of a strictly positivist, or philological approach, since any assessment of Nietzsche’s politics cannot be detached from the political faultlines of the present.

scholarly journals The Frankfurt School and the authoritarian personality: Balance sheet of an insight

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 072551362110059
Author(s):  
Geoff Boucher
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Balance Sheet ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
The Other ◽  
Authoritarian Personality ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Authoritarian Populism ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
School Research

Frankfurt School critical theory is perhaps the most significant theory of society to have developed directly from a research programme focused on the critique of political authoritarianism, as it manifested during the interwar decades of the 20th century. The Frankfurt School’s analysis of the persistent roots – and therefore the perennial nature – of what it describes as the ‘authoritarian personality’ remains influential in the analysis of authoritarian populism in the contemporary world, as evidenced by several recent studies. Yet the tendency in these studies is to reference the final formulation of the category, as expressed in Theodor Adorno and co-thinkers’ The Authoritarian Personality (1950), as if this were a theoretical readymade that can be unproblematically inserted into a measured assessment of the threat to democracy posed by current authoritarian trends. It is high time that the theoretical commitments and political stakes in the category of the authoritarian personality are re-evaluated, in light of the evolution of the Frankfurt School. In this paper, I review the classical theories of the authoritarian personality, arguing that two quite different versions of the theory – one characterological, the other psychodynamic – can be extracted from Frankfurt School research.

Virtues and Capabilities

2018 ◽  
pp. 586-599
Author(s):  
Steven Torrente ◽  
Harry D. Gould
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Capabilities Approach ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
Moral Concepts ◽  
International Political Theory ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Ethical Systems

After a long dormancy in the modern era, virtue-based ethical thought has once again become a subject of serious consideration and debate in the field of philosophy. The normative orientation of most International Political Theory, however, still comes primarily from principles-based (deontological) or outcome-based (consequentialist) ethical systems. Virtue ethics differs from focus deontological and consequentialist ethics by emphasizing character, context, and way of life, rather than rule-governed action. This chapter reviews the emergence of contemporary virtue ethics as a challenge to overly abstract, language-based analysis of moral concepts, and its development into a broad and nuanced ethical theory. It then connects virtue ethics to the capabilities approach to human development, which is similarly focused.

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