The Scandal of Reason

by Azmanova, Albena

• ISBN13: 9780231153805
• ISBN10: 0231153805
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-03-27
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

Theories of justice struggle to balance vision and practicality. As with Habermas, the more demanding the ideal of justice, the less connected the theory is to political reality; as with Rawls, the more politically realistic the theory, the weaker its normative criteria, rendering the theory unreliable. Brokering a resolution to the "judgment paradox," Albena Azmanova advances a "critical consensus" model of judgment, which serves the normative ideals of a just society without resorting to ideal theory. Tracing the evolution of two major traditions in political philosophy -- critical theory and philosophical liberalism -- and the way they confront the judgment paradox, Azmanova critiques prevailing models of deliberative democracy and their preference for ideal theory over political applicability. Instead, she replaces the reliance on normative models of democracy with an account of the dynamics of reasoned judgment, produced in democratic practices of open dialogues. Combining Arendt's study of judgment with Bourdieu's social critique of power relations, and incorporating elements of political epistemology from Kant, Wittgenstein, H. L. A. Hart, Weber, and American philosophical pragmatism, Azmanova centers her inquiry on the way participants in moral conflicts attribute meaning to their grievances of injustice. She then demonstrates the emancipatory potential of the model of judgment she forges and its capacity to guide policy making. The model's critical force derives from the capacity to disclose common structural sources of injustice behind conflicting claims to justice. Moving beyond the conflict between universalist and pluralist positions, Azmanova grounds the question of "what is justice?" in the empirical reality of "who suffers?" to detect attainable possibilities for a less unjust world.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Introduction: The Scandal of Reason and the Paradox of Judgment	p. 1
The Shortfalls of Political Ethics	p. 1
The Paradox of Judgment: Social Criticism Between the Morally Imperative and the Politically Expedient	p. 5
The Urgent Nature of the Political	p. 8
Toward a Political Epistemology of Judgment	p. 12
Conceptual Resources of the Model	p. 15
The Structure of the Argument	p. 17
Political Judgment and the Vocation of Critical Theory	p. 21
Political Judgment: Between Politics and Governance	p. 22
The Paradox of Judgment in the Standard Normative Model	p. 25
Justice in Complex Democracies: The Communicative Turn	p. 28
The "Public Reason" Solution: The Discursive Normative Model	p. 31
The Rivalry Between Legitimacy and Justice	p. 34
Deliberative Democracy: Justice beyond Legitimacy	p. 36
Conclusion: The Demands on Dialogical Democracy	p. 40
Critical Theory: Political Judgment as Ideologiekritik	p. 43
Why Communicative Therapy Would Not Do	p. 44
The Frankfurt School: Six Components of Critical Theory	p. 45
The Communicative Turn	p. 53
The Pragmatic Turn	p. 57
Conclusion: The Price of Social Criticism	p. 62
Philosophical Liberalism: Reasonable Judgment	p. 65
Transformation as a Point of Departure	p. 65
Normative Validity Within the Original Liberal Model	p. 67
From Justice to Judgment	p. 71
Toward a Discourse Normative Model	p. 77
A Reluctant and Conservative Turn	p. 83
Conclusion: The Price of Reasonable Justice	p. 89
Philosophical Liberalism and Critical Theory in Dispute	p. 92
Communicative Solutions to the Judgment Paradox	p. 93
Rawls Versus Habermas on Compliance, Legitimacy, and Justice	p. 96
Communicative Justification Gone Astray?	p. 103
A Farewell to Social Criticism	p. 109
Conclusion: Who Is Afraid of the Hermeneutic Turn?	p. 113
Judgment Unbound: Arendt	p. 118
Philosophy's Coming of Age: Daring to Judge	p. 118
Judging the Political: Sensible Judgment	p. 120
The Preconditions for Judging: Dialectics of Seeing	p. 128
Critique of Power without Social Criticism?	p. 132
Conclusion: Toward Social Hermeneutics of Judgment	p. 134
From Critique of Power to a Critical Theory of Judgment	p. 136
Toward a Critical Consensus Model of Justification	p. 136
The Vindication of Critical Theory: Six Trajectories	p. 139
Social Criticism after the Communicative Turn	p. 150
The Political Epistemology of Judgment	p. 160
The Constitution of Public Reason and Its Normative Effect	p. 162
Paradigms of Articulation and Signification	p. 166
The Structural Sources of Phronetic Normativity	p. 173
The Critical Consensus Model	p. 180
Revising the Discourse Normative Model	p. 181
Recasting the Hermeneutic Level	p. 182
Human Interests and Normative Reasons	p. 185
Validity	p. 189
Judgment, Criticism, Innovation	p. 201
From Dialogical Consensus to Social Criticism	p. 201
The Possibility of Discursive Disagreement (First Degree of Criticism)	p. 205
The "Enlarged Mentality" (Second Degree of Criticism)	p. 208
Judging as Critique of Ideology (Third Degree of Criticism)	p. 217
Judging and Criteria of Justice	p. 221
Normative Innovation and Social Change	p. 222
Conclusion: Letting Go of Ideal Theory	p. 227
Glossary	p. 239
Notes	p. 243
References	p. 265
Index	p. 273
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