Chad Kautzer

Self-defensive subjectivity The diagnosis of a social pathology

In his book Das Recht der Freiheit (2011), Axel Honneth develops a theory of social justice that incorporates negative, reflexive and social forms of freedom as well as the institutional conditions necessary for their reproduction. This account enables the identification of social pathologies or systemic normative deficits that frustrate individual efforts to relate their actions reflexively to a normative order and inhibits their ability to recognize the freedom of others as a condition of their own. In this article I utilize Honneth’s theory in the diagnosis of a contemporary social pathology, which impedes social recognition and thereby contributes to social injustice. I argue that this particular social pathology – associated with the Second Amendment right to bear arms – has given rise to a pernicious form of subjectivity, which I call self-defensive. I conclude with some remarks concerning what this application reveals about the strengths and weaknesses of Honneth’s account.

Law and resistance in the prisons of empire: an interview with Angela Y. Davis

Angela Davis’s political activism began when she was a youngster in Birmingham, Alabama, and continued through her high school years in New York. But it was not until 1969 that she came to national attention after being removed from her teaching position in the Philosophy Department at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) because of her social activism and her membership in the Communist Party, U.S.A. In 1970 she was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List on false charges, and was the subject of an intense police search that drove her underground and culminated in one of the most famous trials in recent U.S. history. During her 16-month incarceration, a massive international “Free Angela Davis” campaign was organized, leading to her acquittal in 1972. Professor Davis’s long-standing commitment to prisoners’ rights dates back to her involvement in the campaign to free the Soledad brothers, which led to her own arrest and imprisonment. Today she remains an advocate of prison abolition and has developed a powerful critique of racism in the criminal justice system. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Prison Activist Resource Center, and currently is working on a comparative study of women’s imprisonment in the U.S., The Netherlands, and Cuba. Former California Governor Ronald Reagan once vowed that Angela Davis would never again teach in the University of California system. Today she is a tenured professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1994, she received the distinguished honor of an appointment to the University of California Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies ( http://humwww.ucsc.edu:16080/HistCon/ faculty davis.htm ).

Contract and Domination (review)

of religion, and social philosophy. It seems that Kegley had a community of philosophers in mind as she wrote, although this community is diverse and includes scholars and students, pragmatists and phenomenologists, empiricists and theists. Throughout the text, Kegley provides a careful, close, exegetical reading of a variety of Royce’s work, bearing in mind the pluralism of her audience. She reaches beyond the better-known texts in the Roycean corpus to include many earlier works such as “Tests of Right and Wrong” from 1880 as well as occasionally dismissed works such as War and Insurance , which she admits is “viewed by some as eccentric at best” (133). The depth of her research matches the breadth of the topics addressed as well as the backgrounds of her readers and allows her to create a sweeping but sound line of argumentation. Kegley writes that “Royce strongly believed that the best sources for understanding a person were reading their books and essays and observing their thought in action” (1). She has done precisely this in her book, and the reader is left with a better understanding of Royce the thinker and teacher (that is, Royce the person ), as well as his philosophy, due to her efforts.