Justification Crisis: Brexit, Trump, and Deliberative Breakdown

This essay explores the problem of legitimation crises in deliberative systems. For some time now, theorists of deliberative democracy have started to embrace a “systemic approach.” But if deliberative democracy is to be understood in the context of a system of multiple moving parts, then we must confront the possibility that that system’s dynamics may admit of breakdowns, contradictions, and tendencies toward crisis. Yet such crisis potentials remain largely unexplored in deliberative theory. The present article works toward rectifying this lacuna, using the 2016 Brexit and Trump votes as examples of a particular kind of “legitimation crisis” that results in a sequence of failures in the deliberative system. Drawing on recent work of Rainer Forst, I identify this particular kind of legitimation crisis as a “justification crisis.”

The Colonial Genealogies of Political Decay and Legitimation Crises: An Enquiry into the Predicament of State-construction in Post-colonial South Asia

This article is an attempt to conceptualise and theoretically explain the colonial genealogies of the processes of state-making and state-construction in post-colonial South Asia. In pursuit of this, the article seeks to theorise the colonial ways of providing a sense of fixity of political territoriality, held together by colonially crafted institutions of metropolitan governance, as an independent variable in determining the nature of the processes of state-making and state-construction in the region. On this count, an enquiry into the complex trajectory of these post-colonial political processes, which are the dependent variables for this article, is the fundamental problematic of analysis. This problematic would be decoded with the help of a dual conceptual framework, involving what Samuel Huntington designates as political decay and the legitimation crisis given by Jurgen Habermas. In the context of South Asia, the predicaments of political decay and legitimation crisis, according to this article, manifest as after-effects of engagement on the part of the region’s post-colonial polities with the imported values of colonial modernity and neoliberal economic reforms. By drawing instances from two countries of the Indian subcontinent, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the article tries to show how these after-effects have played out in the form of a tumultuous political history of the processes of state-making and state-construction. The article, in this way, is an attempt to theorise the inter-sectionalities between the colonial and post-colonial periods of South Asia. This has been done here by problematising such a historical inter-sectionality from the perspective of the two intervening variables—the received values of colonial metropolis and the morals of modernity—mediated through neoliberal economic reforms.

Marx, financial capitalism and the fractured society: Using Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism to frame a transformatory sociological programme of action for resistance and change

This article begins by considering the relevance and limitations of Marx’s writings for understanding post-1970s financial capitalism. Two specific propositions are outlined and developed. The first is that twenty-first-century financial capitalism is conspicuously vulnerable to implosion or collapse, notably via a Habermasian ‘legitimation crisis’. The second traces its progressive ‘fracturing’, with references to neoliberal austerity and post-welfarism and their deepening impact on the disadvantaged and vulnerable and the sick and disabled. The article then turns to Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism, suggesting, and attempting to show, that it lends additional philosophical and theoretical weight (‘deepens’ in Bhaskar’s terms) the reach and range of Marxian analyses. The third part of the article focuses on Bhaskar’s evolving theory of transformative – or emancipatory – action. It is contended that his account grounds and allows for rational and compelling resistance to financial capitalism’s neoliberal status quo. In the concluding section, the affinity between Bhaskar’s (neo-Marxian) theory of transformative action and the present authors’ concept of ‘action sociology’ is outlined. The article concludes with a manifesto for an action sociology oriented to ‘absence’, challenging ‘constraining ills’ and imagining and researching ‘alternate futures’.

The Structural Power of Finance

It has been established that power lies at the heart of the sovereign debt puzzle. This chapter asks: What are the precise mechanisms through which finance exerts its power? Under what conditions are these mechanisms likely to be effective, and under what conditions are they likely to break down? How have these dynamics been impacted by the globalization and financialization of the capitalist economy in recent decades? And what, if anything, can still be done to counteract the power of finance from below? It is argued that a distressed sovereign borrower will only choose to renege on its financial obligations if the social costs of repayment have become unbearable and citizens threaten to withdraw their loyalty to the state. Only in the context of a destabilizing legitimation crisis and a citizens' revolt from below will the administrators of a contemporary “debt state” ever contemplate defying their private creditors by defaulting on their financial obligations.

Toxic Masculinity and the Quest for Ecclesial Legitimation

This essay analyzes masculinity as an ecclesial strategy for maintaining cultural and political power. It begins by examining the masculine theology promoted by the German Christian Movement that gave religious justification for Nazism’s violence against those who did not conform to their masculine norms. Drawing on conceptions of ‘legitimation crisis’ and masculinities studies, it argues that the masculine theology of the German Christians, predicated on a desire for social and political relevancy, shares a similar logic with current American evangelical masculinity. In conclusion, it turns to Dietrich Bonhoeffer for resources of ecclesial resistance to these masculine temptations for cultural relevancy and political power.