Thomas McCarthy

Coming to Terms with Our Past, Part II: On the Morality and Politics of Reparations for Slavery

There has recently been a surge of interest, theoretical and political, in reparations for slavery. This essay takes up several moral-political issues from that intensifying debate: how to conceptualize and justify collective compensation and collective responsibility, and how to establish a plausible connection between past racial injustices and present racial inequalities. It concludes with some brief remarks on one aspect of the very complicated politics of reparations: the possible effects of hearings and trials on the public memory and political culture of a historically racist society. The hope is that these arguments, taken together, draft a coherent case for slavery reparations as pursued by the Reparations Coordinating Committee.

Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the USA On the Politics of the Memory of Slavery

The settlement of the North American continent was... a consequence not of any higher claim in a democratic or international sense, but rather of a consciousness of what is right which had its sole roots in the conviction of the superiority and thus of the right of the white race. —Adolf Hitler, 1932

On misunderstanding ‘understanding’

Philosophers of Science have recently put a good deal of energy into locating the precise methodological boundaries between the natural and the social sciences. The methodological affinities of the latter with certain aspects of the humanities have been as yet too little explored. A convenient starting point for this discussion, and one which is adopted in this paper, is a reconsideration of the role and nature of interpretive understanding in the social sciences. However, before a serious examination of this issue can be undertaken, a clearing operation on the encrusted misunderstandings which are part of the legacy of logical positivism is necessary. In this paper I argue that the neo-positivistic account of understanding rests on a misunderstanding of the concept; that a more adequate conception of the issues involved - and one closer to the traditional Verstehen problematic of Dilthey et al. - can be gleaned from the work of Peter Winch; and that this development is furthered in a number of important respects by recent work done in hermeneutic philosophy - especially that of H.-G. Gadamer. The discussion of Gadamer suggests that the problem of locating the boundaries with the humanities might be as serious a problem for the theory of the social sciences as has been that concerning the natural sciences. The paper concludes with several suggestions as to the implications of the analysis of understanding for the thesis of the methodological unity of the sciences.

Communication and the Evolution of Society

Translators Introduction. 1. What is Universal Pragmatics?. 2. Moral Development and Ego Identity. 3. Historical Materialsim and the Development of Normative Structures. 4. Towards a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism. 5. Legitimation Problems in the Modern State. Notes. Index.

History and Critical Social Theory@@@The Theory of Communicative Action: Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason.

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The Operation Called Verstehen: Towards a Redefinition of the Problem

One of the more constant elements in the ‘legacy of logical positivism’ has been a rather low estimate of the importance of the concept of Verstehen for a logic of the social sciences. To be sure, it has been the accepted practice among philosophers under the influence of this movement that any extended treatment of the logic of the social sciences include an analysis of the role of Verstehen. But these analyses have almost invariably taken the form of a whittling down to size of an out-sized concept with, it is often noted, rather suspicious origins in German metaphysical thought.

Book ReviewsNancy Fraser, , and Axel Honneth, .Redistribution or Recognition? A Political‐Philosophical Exchange. Translated by Joel Golb, James Ingram, and Christiane Wilke.London: Verso, 2003. Pp. ix+276.

The debate format has its advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, if the participants are as widely informed and theoretically sophisticated as Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, the reader will be provided compact, lucid overviews of broad expanses of contemporary controversy. But the minus side of this very advantage is the need to move at high levels of generality and to pass rather quickly over significant details. In this exchange, the advantage far outweighs the disadvantage, as Fraser and Honneth are “grand theorists” of a high order. Each has been developing her or his distinctive approach for some time now, and both approaches have been fine-tuned through repeated engagements with critics. Indeed, the volume under review represents the pro tempore culmination of a debate between the principals that had already been under way for several years. (See Christopher F. Zurn’s useful discussions in “Identity or Status? Struggles over ‘Recognition’ in Fraser, Honneth, and Taylor,” Constellations 10 [2003]: 519–37, and “Recognition, Redistribution, and Democracy: Dilemmas of Honneth’s Critical Social Theory,” European Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming.) But it is not necessary to be familiar with the earlier exchanges to profit from this one, which is sufficiently self-contained to be comprehensible in its own terms. Another advantage-cum-disadvantage of the debate format is its dialectical character. Fraser and Honneth are one another’s best—or worst—critics. Each raises a number of sharp objections against the other, not all of which are met with convincing replies. Serious objections remain standing on either side, so that the net result includes dialectical problems for both. In what follows, after briefly situating the debate and sketching each position, I shall briefly consider the criticisms that seem most cogent. The Fraser-Honneth exchange is situated in a distinctive tradition of social and political theory: the tradition of “critical theory” stemming from Marx, given a Hegelian turn by Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt School, and recently brought to a high pitch in the writings of Jürgen Habermas. Both authors expressly aim to renew this tradition by continuing the “cultural turn” of Western Marxism in the twentieth century, so as better to comprehend and articulate the “struggles for recognition” that have become characteristic of “new social movements,” from feminism and antiracism to multiculturalism and the politics of identity and difference. And both authors expressly reject—albeit for different reasons— while remaining indebted to—albeit in different ways—central features of Habermas’s earlier efforts at renewal. A point of interesting contrast with contemporary liberal theory is the different twist given to the familiar demand that normative theory be “realistic”

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Commenting in 1795 on the interstate system inaugurated with the Peace of Westphalia a century and a half earlier, Immanuel Kant expressed familiar misgivings concerning the principle of state sovereignty and the right of states to resort to arms to protect their vital interests, both of which remained cornerstones of international law into the twentieth century: The concept of international right becomes meaningless if interpreted as a right to go to war. For this would make it a right to determine what is lawful not by means of universally valid external laws, but by means of one-sided maxims backed up by physical force. It could be taken to mean that it is perfectly just for men who adopt this attitude to destroy one another, and thus to find perpetual peace in the vast grave where all the horrors of violence and those responsible for them would be buried’.1 And in the next breath he proposed an idea of legal pacifism that is still the principal alternative to the state of nature in international affairs: ‘There is only one rational way in which states coexisting with other states can emerge from the lawless condition of pure warfare. Just like individual men, they must renounce their savage and lawless freedom, adapting themselves to public coercive laws, and thus form an international tate (civitas gentium) which would necessarily continue to grow until it embraced all the peoples of the earth’.2

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This article examines racial theories of development in connection with Kant; America exceptionalism, nationalism, and nativism; and the transformation of manifest destiny into a racial destiny. It then focuses on the forms of social Darwinist thinking that pervaded and dominated American intellectual life toward the end of the nineteenth century, as well as the chief ideological uses to which this new racial imaginary was put in domestic and foreign affairs. Finally, it sketches the decline of this dominant ideology and its replacement with a nearly equivalent cultural theory of development and difference.

Two Conceptions of Cosmopolitan Justice

In the book from which my epigraph is taken, Marx Wartofsky focuses his attention on the role of representation in ‘cognitive praxis.’1 He is quite clear, however, that there are other aspects to the indissoluble link between logos and praxis: “[Karl] Marx’s striking aphorism, ‘Language is practical consciousness,’ requires the elaboration that it is also social consciousness, that is, the medium of communication and expression in the contexts of social interaction . . .”2 In this paper I offer some observations on the social-interactional aspect of the connection between reason and practice. Like Wartofsky, I attempt to capture the contextual and pragmatic features of social practice without renouncing the universal and ideal import of the claims of reason. To capture the former, I exploit some recent contributions to the sociology of everyday life by Harold Garfinkel and other ethnomethodologists;3 to capture the latter, I draw upon Jurgen Habermas’s analysis of communicative reason.4 The challenge, of course, will be to integrate these two very different and often opposed approaches into one coherent account of reason in practice. The question of how my account of communicative praxis might be integrated with Wartofsky’s account of cognitive praxis will have to be left to another occasion.