Maeve Cooke

Five Arguments for Deliberative Democracy

Five arguments in favour of deliberative democracy are considered. These focus on its educative power, on its community-generating power, on the fairness of the procedure of public deliberation, on the epistemic quality of its outcomes and on the congruence of the deliberative democratic ideal ‘with whom we are’. The first four arguments are shown to be inadequate. The fifth argument, it is claimed, not only provides the most convincing defence of deliberative democracy but can also be used to decide rationally between competing interpretations of the deliberative ideal. By way of illustration, the essay concludes with a critical discussion of the rival versions proposed by Rawls and Habermas.

Redeeming Redemption The Utopian Dimension of Critical Social Theory

Critical social theory has an uneasy relationship with utopia. On the one hand, the idea of an alternative, better social order is necessary in order to make sense of its criticisms of a given social context. On the other hand, utopian thinking has to avoid ‘bad utopianism’, defined as lack of connection with the actual historical process, and ‘finalism’, defined as closure of the historical process. Contemporary approaches to critical social theory endeavour to avoid these dangers by way of a post metaphysical strategy. However, they run up against the problem that utopian thinking has an unavoidable metaphysical moment. Rather than seeking to eliminate this moment, therefore, they should acknowledge its inevitability. The challenge is to maintain a productive tension between closure and contestability and between attainability and elusiveness. The paper outlines a strategy for meeting this challenge, a strategy that is based on a distinction between the metaphysical content of utopian projections and their fallible claims to validity.

A space of one’s own: autonomy, privacy, liberty

The value of a negatively defined private space is defended as important for the development of personal autonomy. It is argued that negative liberty is problematic when split off from its connection with this ideal. An ethical interpretation of personal autonomy is proposed according to which a private space is one of autonomy’s preconditions. This leads to a conceptualization of privacy that is fruitful in two respects: it permits an account of privacy laws that avoids certain pitfalls, and it serves as a basis for criticizing privacy-related failures of autonomy together with the social forces that produce them. Negative liberty is, furthermore, rejected as an adequate basis for modern law and democracy. Here, too, an ethically defined personal autonomy, of which negative liberty is a precondition, is held to be the most convincing normative foundation. A critical reading of Habermas’ cooriginality thesis is offered in support of this argument.

Avoiding Authoritarianism: On the Problem of Justification in Contemporary Critical Social Theory

Abstract Critical social theories look critically at the ways in which particular social arrangements hinder human flourishing, with a view to bringing about social change for the better. In this they are guided by the idea of a good society in which the identified social impediments to human flourishing would once and for all have been removed. The question of how these guiding ideas of the good life can be justified as valid across socio‐cultural contexts and historical epochs is the most fundamental difficulty facing critical social theories today. This problem of justification, which can be traced back to certain key shifts in the modern Western social imaginary, calls on contemporary theories to negotiate the tensions between the idea of context‐transcendent validity and their own anti‐authoritarian impulses. Habermas makes an important contribution towards resolving the problem, but takes a number of wrong turnings.

Are Ethical Conflicts Irreconcilable

The discussion starts with the fact of ethical disagreement in contemporary liberal democracies. In responding to the question of whether such conflicts are reconcilable, it proposes a normative model of deliberative democracy that seeks to avoid the privatization of ethical concerns. It is argued that many contemporary models of democracy privatize ethical matters either because of a view that ethical conflicts are fundamentally irreconcilable or because of a mis trust of the ideal of rational consensus in the fields of law and politics. Against this, the article contends that most ethical disagree ments are reconcilable in principle; it further suggests that mistrust of the ideal of rational consensus in the fields of law and politics is based on misunderstanding. Here, Habermass model of deliberative democracy is drawn on. His account of public ethical deliberation is criticized and his negative interpretations of civic republicanism and ethical patterning are questioned; however, his model is seen as fundamentally fruitful from the point of view of dealing with ethical conflict.

The Weaknesses of Strong Intersubjectivism Habermas's Conception of Justice

The article deals with Habermass intersubjective approach to critical social theory, focusing on his intersubjective accounts of truth, justice and democratic legitimacy. Distinguishing between stronger and weaker versions of an intersubjective account, it draws attention to Habermass recent move from a strong intersubjective, constructivist, interpretation of truth to a weaker, non-constructivist, one. It then looks at his refusal to make a similar move in the case of justice, arguing that it is not well-founded, even from the point of view of Habermass overall concerns. It contends, in particular, that a strong intersubjective conception is not necessary in order to maintain the close link between normative validity and argumentation that plays an important role in Habermass project of a critical social theory and concludes that the advantages of abandoning a strong intersubjective position outweigh the disadvantages. Consequently, it recommends extension of the weaker, non-constructivist, account that Habermas now proposes in the case of truth to justice as well. In the final section, it considers the implications of this recommendation for Habermass conception of normative validity in the domain of law and politics.

Between ‘Objectivism’ and ‘Contextualism': the Normative Foundations of Social Philosophy

Abstract One of the principal challenges facing contemporary social philosophy is how to find foundations that are normatively robust yet congruent with its self-understanding. Social philosophy is a critical project within modernity, an interpretative horizon that stresses the influences of history and context on knowledge and experience. However, if it is to engage in intercultural dialogue and normatively robust social critique, social philosophy requires non-arbitrary, universal normative standards. The task of normative foundations can thus be formulated in terms of negotiating the tension between ‘contextualism’ and ‘objectivism’. Six contemporary responses to this challenge are examined. Their respective limitations call for renewed reflection on justificatory strategies, in particular for a conception of ‘objectivity’ based in a normative theory of social learning processes.

habermas, autonomy and the identity of the self

My main concern in this essay is Habermas’s conception of autonomy as a constitutive dimension of self-identity. What has turned out to be primarily a discussion of Habermas’s conception of autonomy was sparked off by reflection on the apparent challenge that (the later) Foucault’s conception of autonomy as self-invention poses to Habermas’s conception of autonomy as self-determination. I asked myself whether freedom conceived as self-determination (Habermas) was compatible with freedom conceived as self-invention (the later Foucault) and, if not, how

Meaning and Truth in Habermas's Pragmatics

The article examines Habermas’s formal-pragmatic theory of meaning from the point of view of his attempt to defend a postmetaphysical yet context-transcendent conception of validity. It considers his attempt to develop a pragmatic account of understanding utterances that emphasises the mediation of knowledge through socio-cultural practices while simultaneously stressing that understanding has a cognitive dimension that is inherently context-transcendent. It focuses on his recent “Janus-faced” conception of truth, looking more briefly at his purely epistemic conception of moral validity. It raises three objections: the first to his attempt to maintain a notion of “unconditionality” that has no otherworldly origins but is purely immanent to this world, the second to the alleged non-arbitrary status of his conception of truth, and the third to his rejection of metaphysical thinking. It concludes that the objections, if valid, have profound implications for Habermas’s postmetaphysical enterprise and for his programme of formal pragmatics.

A conversation between Axel Honneth, Amy Allen and Maeve Cooke, Frankfurt am Main, 12 April 2010

This a conversation between Axel Honneth, Amy Allen and Maeve Cooke that took place at Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main on 12 April 2010. The conversation begins with some thoughts on the concept of power, in particular, on Foucaults and Arendts respective interpretations of this concept. It then moves to consider the complex interrelationships between power and recognition, addressing questions such as the relationship between domination and social struggle, the transmission of subordinating social and cultural norms by way of the structural asymmetries of the parent–child relationship and the possibility of distinguishing valid or freedom‐enabling modes of recognition from ideological or dominating ones.