Dmitri N. Shalin

Critical Theory and the Pragmatist Challenge

Habermass theory breaks with the Continental tradition that has denigrated pragmatism as an Aglo-Saxon philosophy subservient to technocratic capitalism. While Habermas deftly uses pragmatist insights into communicative rationality and democratic ethos, he shows little sensitivity to other facets of pragmatism. This article argues that incorporating the pragmatist perspective on experience and indeterminacy brings a corrective to the emancipatory agenda championed by critical theorists. The pragmatist alternative to the theory of communicative action is presented, with the discussion centering around the following themes: disembodied reason versus embodied reasonableness, determinate being versus indeterminate reality, discursive truth versus pragmatic certainty, rational consensus versus reasonable dissent, transcendental democracy versus democratic transcendence, and rational society versus sane community.

G. H. Mead, Socialism, and the Progressive Agenda

Mead is known today primarily for his original philosophy and social psychology. Much less familiar to us is Mead the reformer, a man who sought to balance political engagement with academic detachment and who established himself as an astute critic of contemporary American society. This paper examines Meads political beliefs and his theory of the reform process. Drawing on little-known sources and archival materials, it demonstrates that Mead shared socialisms humanitarian ends and that, following the dominant progressive ideology of his time, he sought to accomplish these ends by constitutional means. An argument is made that Meads ideological commitments had profound effects on his substantive ideas, particularly on the dialectical premises of social interactionism. The final section of the paper discusses the legacy of Mead and the Progressive movement.

Signing in the Flesh: Notes on Pragmatist Hermeneutics

This article offers an alternative to classical hermeneutics, which focuses on discursive products and grasps meaning as the play of difference between linguistic signs. Pragmatist hermeneutics reconstructs meaning through an indefinite triangulation, which brings symbols, icons, and indices to bear on each other and considers a meaningful occasion as an embodied semiotic process. To illuminate the word-body-action nexus, the discussion identifies three basic types of signifying media: (1) the symbolic-discursive, (2) the somatic-affective, and (3) the behavioral-performative, each one marked by a special relationship between signs and their objects. An argument is made that the tension between various type-signifying media is unavoidable, that the pragmatic-discursive misalignment is an ontological condition, and that bridging the gap between our discursive, affective, and behavioral outputs is at the heart of ethical life.

Constructing Capitalism: The Reemergence of Civil Society and Liberal Economy in the Post-Communist World.

Part 1 Regional political economy: mind and body - ideology and economy in the collapse of communism, Leszek Kolakowski two-tiered Stalinism - self-destruction of the system, Valerie Bunce political economy of the East European Soviet trade - rethinking the past and searching for the future, Josef C.Brada. Part 2 Reconstruction of markets: property rights perspective on changes in Eastern European and Soviet economies, K.Poznanski ownership forms and co-ordination mechanisms - reformed socialism and normative implications, Janos Kornai divestment of state capital in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Jozef van Brabant. Part 3 Dilemmas of democratization - the reconstruction of citizenship - reverse implication in Eastern Europe, George Kolankiewicz from social idea to real world - clash between new possibilities and old habits, Mira Marody main paradoxes of the democratic change in Eastern Europe, Jadwiga Staniszkis epilogue - markets and states in the transformation of East European and Soviet societies, K. Poznanski.

Russian culture at the crossroads : paradoxes of postcommunist consciousness

* Introduction: Continuity and Change in Russian Culture Dmitri N. Shalin. * Historical Culture Boris M. Paramonov. * Intellectual Culture D. N. Shalin. * Psychological Culture Alexander M. Etkind. * Religious Culture Jerry G. Pankhurst. * Everyday Culture Svetlana Boym. * Moral Culture Igor S. Kon. * Popular Culture Zara Abdullaeva. * Literary Culture Maurice Friedberg. * Artistic Culture Daniil B. Dondurei. * Labor Culture Vladimir S. Magun. * Civic Culture Yuri A. Levada. * Conclusion: Toward a Post-Soviet Society Frederick Starr. * Afterword Bruce Mazlish.

Liberalism, affect control, and emotionally intelligent democracy*

If ancient Greece is the birthplace of democracy and Athens its earliest incarnation, which deity in the illustrious pantheon of Greek Gods and Goddesses qualifies as its benefactor? No major figure inhabiting Olympus comes to mind, but once you consider the secondtier deities, you find a plausible candidate in Peitho, the Goddess embodying ‘the spirit of agreement, bargain, contract, consensus, exchange, and negotiation in a free polis,’ which, according to Alexander Mourelatos, makes her ‘the patron of civilized life and of democratic institutions.’1 What makes Peitho such an intriguing candidate for the part is that she is also the attendant and companion of Aphrodite, whose capacity to attract and persuade, it would seem, has something to do with the art of living in a democratic polis.2 The discursive strategy linking democracy, civility, and affect is central to the thesis I wish to develop in this essay, namely, that democracy is an embodied process that binds affectively as well as rhetorically and that flourishes in places where civic discourse is not an expedient means to be discarded when it fails to achieve a proximate goal but an end in itself, a source of vitality and social creativity sustaining an emotionally intelligent democratic community. I begin my discussion with a blueprint for democratic polity formulated in ancient Greece and its critical reception at the time. Then I consider the difficulties that fledgling democracies encounter on the way to civil society as they struggle to put behind their historical legacy. Next I make the case that civic discourse is inseparable from the civic body which has been misshapen by past abuses and which takes a long time to heal. Finally, drawing on Norbert Elias’s work on the civilizing process, I speculate about the emotion, demeanor, and the body language of democracy, and explore from this angle the prospects for democratic transformation in countries that are struggling to shake their totalitarian past.

Hermeneutics and Prejudice: Heidegger and Gadamer in Their Historical Setting

This is an inquiry into the paradoxes of ontological and phenomenological hermeneutics whose founders called for radical self-reflection but failed to recognize the intellectual debt their theories owed to the historical tradition within which they were articulated. My thesis is that (a) Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s early views fed off the affective-political currents of the Weimar and Hitler Germany, that (b) both authors systematically misinterpreted their Nazi era discursive-affective-performative corpus, and that (c) the hermeneutics of prejudice grounded on Heidegger’s fundamental ontology lacks the theoretical tools for hermeneutic critique and self-reflection insofar as it privileges language as a medium of interpretation.

Russian intelligentsia in the age of counterperestroika

In 57 B.C.E., Marcus Tullius Cicero, a Roman consul and leading public intellectual, ran into heavy political headwinds. After turning down Caesar’s invitation to join the antirepublican forces, he was driven into exile where he brooded about the duty he owed to himself, his family and his country. In a letter to his friend Atticus, Cicero outlined the stark moral choices committed citizens face when the fate of the republic hangs in the balance. The question is

George Herbert Mead as a Macro-Sociologist: The Promise Unfulfilled?

crucial years around 1930? Notice that Mead’s last works—The Philosophy of the Present, The Philosophy of the Act, his interpretation of relativity theory (rather like Whitehead’s Process and Reality in the 1920s)—are more idealist than what he had been saying in the early 1900s, especially when he was associated with the animal behaviorist John B. Watson. A telling comparison arises in Huebner’s treatment of Blumer and Morris. Ellsworth Faris began to slice off the distinctively social-psychological version of Mead in his courses. But Blumer makes a stronger effect, promoting a full-scale movement that he calls Symbolic Interaction, by inspiring further generations of students at Chicago and Berkeley to create a style of research focused on situational processes that would generate its own stream of discoveries. Blumer energized this movement with his criticism of positivistic methods as remote from the action. This too was crucial organizationbuilding, since intellectual life is energized by conflict. Morris took the other tack. He stayed in philosophy and developed Mead’s work into a general theory of signs. It was a favorable time to do this, since the movement of what became semiotics was burgeoning in the 1920s and ‘30s on many fronts, in Russia, Europe, and England. Morris makes some important contributions to semiotics, but he loses his reputation by pushing further into a grand philosophy in the Hegel-Nietzsche-Spengler vein. He expands his theory of signs into a cosmological and moral system, attempting to synthesize a world religion. Here Morris is truer to the evolutionary-processual-mind-in-nature philosophy of Mead. But Morris fails to attract followers, and the position dies. Blumer’s selection from Mead’s works survives and thrives downstream. Morris’s selection does not. It is a powerful demonstration of how downstream networks shape ideas, both as successes and as failures.