Emancipatory politics at its limits? An introduction

Emancipatory politics and the very idea of emancipation have come under pressure. Feminist and post-colonial critiques, the appropriation of emancipatory ideals by right-wing populists and the crises triggered by the transgression of planetary boundaries all expose emancipatory paradoxes and raise questions about the further suitability of emancipation as a regulative ideal guiding any socio-ecological transformation of contemporary consumer societies. With this article, which introduces a Special Issue entitled The Dialectic of Emancipation - Transgressing Boundaries and Boundaries of Transgression, we are working toward a research agenda that acknowledges the current impasse of emancipatory politics and explores its ambivalences and further potentials. Following an outline of the emancipatory paradox and a review of how emancipatory movements have continuously contested – and redrawn – restrictive boundaries, we scan sedimented understandings of the two key terms, emancipation and dialectic, feeding into the concept that we are suggesting as an analytical lens for investigating the current impasse and future prospects of emancipatory politics: the dialectic of emancipation. We preview how the contributors to this Special Issue make use of these terms as they are engaging with this research agenda and conclude by reflecting on the dangers and pitfalls associated with the concept dialectic of emancipation.

Diplomacy and Grand Strategy

Grand strategy can be said to reflect a certain agentic hubris, as if states operate in an environment that is known and controllable. Diplomacy, by contrast, is typically associated with a set of tasks—negotiation, communication, representation—that reflect agentic constraints. Building on the editors’ reflection on grand strategy as an unattainable yet regulative ideal for the conduct of foreign policy, I discuss how grand strategy is integral to states’ presentation of themselves as sovereign—as having a level of control over their environment. The argument falls in three parts: part one introduces grand strategy and diplomacy as core terms. Part two discuss how diplomacy and grand strategy is defined and discussed, highlighting different readings of grand strategy, and introducing an institutional perspective on diplomacy. Part three moves on to reflect on whether grand strategy is a necessary illusion for states to uphold to demonstrate agency vis-à-vis internal and external audiences, and how particular elements of “grand strategy” live on as informal yet defining features of a state’s diplomacy.

Redeeming God, Redeeming Redemption

On the Rosenzweigian view that I advocate here, redemption is neither a humanly attainable ideal, nor a regulative ideal, nor a solely critical ideal. Redemption is rather a human actualization whose full realization depends on God. In the course of explicating this claim I explore the rabbinic and kabbalistic background to Rosenzweig’s position.

Living Virtuously as a Regulative Ideal

Transhumanists accuse their critics of pessimism and defeatism, but they display these attitudes toward humanity itself. Marked improvements in our situation must stem from dedicated efforts to narrow the gap between reflectively affirmed human ideals and their worldly manifestations. Virtue ethics is well poised to serve as an umbrella for these efforts because it concentrates on who we are as people, integrating levels of concern, individual up through civic. A potent way to mobilize people is to tap into what many already care substantially about but whose opportunities for cultivation and expression are constricted as things stand. In the United States, both virtue and core American ideals fit the bill. Recourse to the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. shows that virtue ethics and liberal commitments to justice and equality are compatible. The approach to virtue ethics whose cornerstones the author sketches in this chapter is rooted in Aristotle but adapted to America today.

Re-purposing evaluation to learn about social justice: Reconfiguring epistemological politics through the regulative ideal of ‘participatory parity’

The article aims to re-purpose evaluation to learn about social justice by anchoring evaluation in normative dimensions. This article demonstrates the ways in which evaluation with an establishment orientation can limit the scope for dialogue and neglect narratives that contest the status quo. It explains how a more participatory approach that engages with the standpoints of marginalised participants can enhance the potential to learn about social justice. An ethical commitment to social justice does not mean a rejection of rigour in evidence-based evaluation. Relating Fraser’s critical theory of participatory parity to the regulative ideal of evaluation creates a foundation to systematically foreground explanations about how an intervention has delivered social justice.

The Democracy of Everyday Life in Disaster

Neighbors inhabit a distinct social sphere whose regulative ideal is the democracy of everyday life. Its chief elements are reciprocity and a practical disregard for the differences and inequalities that shape interactions in the broader society and in democratic politics. The democracy of everyday life has heightened significance during disasters. Neighbors hold our lives in their hands. But COVID-19 differs from physical disasters in ways that alter neighbor interactions. Contamination makes relations more fearful at the same time that isolation makes them more valuable. When the meaning attributed to the virus is not shared experience of disease and mortality but rabid partisanship, neighbor relations become distorted. This degradation of the democracy of everyday life signals that democracy itself is imperiled more deeply than political paralysis, corruption, and institutional failure suggest.

James and Politics: The Radical Democracy of a Radical Empiricist

William James never developed a comprehensive political philosophy. The radically pluralist epistemology and metaphysics for which “pragmatism” became his shorthand represented a revolt against all closed systems of thought. Yet James’s very resistance to certainty and finality led him to participate actively in civic life. Varying by context, this activity was consistently guided by James’s pragmatist accounts of individual experience, moral obligation, and social interdependence, which to him implied a collective, ongoing responsibility to balance freedom, justice, and order amid complexity and change. Though providing no detailed blueprint for achieving and maintaining that balance, James’s writings suggest a suite of practices and institutions that, in various forms and degrees, have proven effective in the past and deserve continued trial. These writings also articulate a regulative ideal by which to evaluate all such experiments: an ideal of popular participation in all levels of social ordering that James described, toward the end of his life, as “radical democracy.”

Education for the Whole Person in a Modern East Asian Context: “Caring-About the World” as a Form of Self-Love

Purpose: The essay attempts to explore a possibility to conceive the idea of education for the whole person as a way of recovering the old spirit of liberal education or Bildung, yet in a new language. Design/Approach/Methods: The essay largely consists of two parts. The first part touches upon and diagnoses the current problems with educational culture in modern Korea where youths suffer their divided soul, by employing Rousseau’s notions of two different kinds of self-love, amour-de-soi and amour-propre. The second part addresses how the pursuit of the whole person as being wholehearted can be a healthy form of self-love mediated by love of the world or other persons. Findings: The idea of education for the whole person may turn out to be an unfeasible ideal, in the modern condition. Yet, being a whole person as wholehearted can be taken as a regulative ideal that guides our practice in teaching and learning, stimulating us to make an effort to be so despite our knowledge that it is out of reach. Originality/Value: The essay shows how the idea of education for the whole person can be newly interpreted in modern East Asian context, which can resonate with current problems with education culture in the West as well as around the globe for the age of measurement.