This is the complete text of my original review for the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. The final version was cut down to less than half this length (due to new space requirements; the NDPR used to publish reviews up to 10,000 words long). I make the original version available here for the sake of facilitating a more complete evaluation of the issues raised in this review.

 

End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, Amy Allen. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.  Pp. 257 including notes + 23 pages of Bibliography and Index.  $55.00 in hardcover.

 

JOHN J. DAVENPORT, Fordham University

 

I. Background. Even to a reader like myself who has observed the development of Critical Theory from some distance over the last quarter-century, it has been clear that a battle was developing for the heart and soul of this philosophical genre. The early Frankfurt School critics were something like social psychologists offering insights into the breakdowns of humanity in the rise of "technocratic mentalities" that facilitated the Holocaust; but their positive resources for justifying progressive political reforms were quite limited. Jürgen Habermas's theory of communication, "discourse ethics," and subsequent defenses of democratic rights provided a new basis for defending "lifeworld" values from commodification, for transnational movements and identities, for solidarity based on loyalty to constitutional principles, and eventually for human rights as essential to a just global order that tames forces of free markets to defend public goods. His ambitions have been developed in different ways in the last 20 years by Thomas McCarthy, Axel Honneth, Rainer Forst, Seyla Benhabib, James Bohman, Kenneth Baynes and others who have tried to overcome problems they found in Habermas's early and middle-period efforts to articulate a new critical theory capable of grounding norms needed in modern discourses to justify institutions for contemporary life.

But at the same time during the last three decades of the 20th century, what we may loosely call "postmodern" critiques of universalist ideals spread throughout Europe and north America as scholars attended to arguments from Jacques Derrida, Michael Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and others who were all strongly influenced by Nietzsche's attack on Kantian, utilitarian, and Christian ethics in the Genealogy of Morals and other works. Bernard Williams added a similar neo-Nietzschian voice within analytic moral philosophy. A synergy developed between this postmodern movement and certain strands of social theory such as the "postcolonial" studies inspired by Edward Said's Orientialism, along with "Critical Race theory" (e.g. Robert Young's White Mythologies: Writing History and the West), and even more mainstream forms of communitarian political philosophy, because they seemed to agree – to some extent, or in some respects – in doubting the universal validity or applicability of moral ideals such a human rights standards, which they tendentiously dubbed as "western" or "white." A few communitarian scholars joined in, touting the so-called "Asian values" critique of more cosmopolitan conceptions of human rights.

It was inevitable that this neo-Nietzschian synthesis would eventually be directed against Habermas, as in Bill Martin's infamous critique of Habermas on the grounds that any "ethico-political universalism or Enlightenment" necessarily construes the "Third World" as "other" – otherness being here a general term of art for alien or suppressed peoples and viewpoints.[1]  Martin's essay has proven to be typical of this postmodern synthesis in arguing against duties of developed nations to stop crimes of aggression and crimes against humanity: in particular, Martin followed James Marsh in calling Habermas "Eurocentric" for supporting the 1991 "Gulf War" to drive Saddam Hussein's forces back out of Kuwait. He also characterized Habermas's support for NATO intervention to stop the mass slaughter in Bosnia as promoting "the invasion of Yugoslavia" – thereby sounding like a spokesman for Milosevic. William McBride similarly followed with strange remarks implying that NATO's actions to stop mass atrocities were really an effort to impose "capitalism" on Yugloslavia (despite over 100,000 Bosnian victims and Holbroke's completely evident humanitarian intentions).[2] Today, writers in this postmodern genre seems largely set against humanitarian intervention in all cases on the specious basis that such intervention must always be a form of "western imperialism." [3] Against Habermas, these postmodern authors now follow Carl Schmitt's Nietzsche-inspired postulate that appeals to universal "humanity" are always mostly a cloak for some kind of power-play. Indeed the issues raised by Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur seem to have been quite important in provoking this crisis within Critical Theory.

It was in this charged context that Amy Allen wrote The End of Progress,[4] in which she argues that Habermas and his left-Hegelian successors remain too dependent on a concept of historical progress that implies the general superiority of Western cultures shaped by the Enlightenment. Notably, Martin and William McBride also accuse Habermas of regarding Europe as "the staging ground for all the political developments that matter," or of seeing "progress as a fact" now sufficiently evident as we look back to the beginning of modernity.[5] Allen is heir to the strands in the postmodern synthesis, and to the catchphrases that these strands introduced to construe universalist norms allegedly based in global standards of practical reasoning as instead "colonialist," "imperialist," "racist," or even "white," "male," and "hetero" – a strategy that employs tired, pejorative labeling as a substitute for substantive argument. Nevertheless, Allen is admirably lucid in her writing; she sets out important concerns in clear lines of argument, unlike some others in the Foucaultian genre challenging Habermasian Critical Theory today (or Habermas himself when he employs too much inside jargon). It is hardly ever difficult to follow Allen's thinking or to see the nuances in her claims, even if she occasionally indulges in the kind of rhetorical flourishes that sometimes obscure work indebted to French poststructuralist thought.

 

II.  The Structure of Allen's Analysis. Allen identifies two main goals for her book. The first is to critique Habermas and two of his main successors – Honneth and Forst – as "wedded to problematically Eurocentric and/or foundationalist strategies for grounding normativity," including implicitly "colonialist" notions of intellectual and social progress. The second is to "decolonize Frankfurt School critical theory" by offering alternative bases for normativity that take on board the concerns of "decolonial theory," critical race theory, and queer theory that have been sidelined by mainstream critical theorists because of their debts to French poststructuralism (p.xii). Her argumentative strategy is to set up a trilemma (see pp. 13-15):

  1. the "long-standing" problem of relativism, of which postcolonial theory is accused;
  2. justifying rational autonomy or social freedom as outcomes of "a progressive process of social evolution or sociocultural learning," which turns out to depend on a problematic conception of progress already accomplished; and
  3. rationalist foundationalism (e.g. of neo-Kantian varieties) which ties political philosophy to ideal theory and makes social criticism into a form of "applied ethics."

Allen's thesis is that in trying to avoid horns (a) and (c), Habermas and Honneth each fall into two variants of horn (b): they try to avoid the "twin evils of foundationalism and relativism" by grounding their critical theories "immanently, in the actual social world" and reconstructing the norms emerging from the implicit trajectory of social history (pp.13-14). While Allen agrees with an immanent grounding, she argues that their versions depend on a (morally and factually) suspect idea of progress. Forst, by contrast, holds that "progress" is a "normatively dependent concept" depending on universal standards rather than supporting them. But he thereby falls into horn (c) in Allen's view, while she hopes to avoid all three horns by returning to a more contextualist theory inspired by Adorno and Foucault.

Given space limits, I will focus on the main theme of varying conceptions of social progress and their problems, along with Allen's alternative. Although I do not think she is entirely fair to them, I will not evaluate Allen's interpretations of Habermas and Honneth in detail; instead, I will concentrate on her critique of their reliance on "backward-looking" or accomplished progress, e.g. as Honneth thinks is evinced by growing acceptance of gay marriage. Similarly, while I will not assess her interpretation of Forst in detail, I will defend Forst against some of her deeper criticisms. These cases will clarify some of the biases that I think are at work in Allen's own post/decolonial tradition, which in turn inflate her skepticism towards claims of accomplished progress. This prepares the ground for some objections to Allen's own proposed alternative normative basis or vision for a "decolonized Critical Theory." Overall, I will argue that Critical Theory can reject excessively ideological and exaggerated charges of "colonialism," though I will express cautious sympathy with some of Allen's doubts about depending on any strongly structured or stage-wise conception of human history. Thus Forst's alternative may emerge as the most viable in my view. Still, after Heidegger and Gadamer, perhaps it is not possible to defend a moral theory (or theory of norms more broadly) without depending on some at-least implicit theory of history. Allen does not fully wrestle with this prospect that ethics is inescapably tied to philosophy of history, which arguably follows from key theses of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor as well; it would be good to take on this question in future work.

 

III. The Allegedly "Colonialist" Idea of Progress. Allen's main argument in this book contends that, despite rejecting rationalist ideas of necessary or teleologically determined historical progress (Kant, Hegel, and Marx), much recent work in Critical Theory depends on an idea of historical progress "that has led up to 'us,'" or to our institutions, practices, and conception of reason. This idea of progress as an accomplished "fact" is more dangerous in her view than forward-looking or prospective progress "as a normative goal that we are striving to achieve," e.g. a "good" or "more just" society (p.12). Interestingly, Allen admits that the forward- and backward-looking senses of progress are not easily separated in practice, because Habermas and Honneth rely on progress already accomplished to help justify the norms by which they define progress as a normative goal for the future (p.15). Yet her hope is to show the possibility of a critical theory that does not depend on backward-looking progress (pp.32-33). However, if we can define a moral ideal without appeal to accomplished progress, we could then measure past progress with respect to that ideal. So Allen's real concern cannot to be with backward-looking progress per se, but rather with appeal to such progress to justify moral norms or ethical ideals. 

            In any case, the Allen explains two kinds of objections to past or accomplished progress. The second is epistemological: "On what basis to we claim to know what counts as progress?" (p.19). The first objection concerns the "entwinement of the idea of historical progress with the legacies of racism, colonialism, and imperialist and their contemporary neocolonial or informally imperialist forms" (p.16). This refers to the familiar worry that seeing western cultures as more socially (as well as technologically) "advanced" provided a key ideological justification for "the colonial and imperial projects" (p.17); European identity was defined as "superior" in comparison to non-western groups, and positioning other races as "pre- or nonmodern" helped to justify formal and informal versions of empire-building by Europeans. There are some historical problems with this argument; for example, slavery existed in Moorish parts of Spain and in North Africa before the conquistadors set out. Still, there is no doubt that cultural superiority was later invoked as a justification for empire as late as the establishment of colonial mandates under the League of Nations in the early 20th century.

            But the fundamental problem with this critique of accomplished progress as an inherently colonialist notion is simply that a historical thesis A may be used to justify a policy B that A does not entail. 19th century conservatives sometimes pressed Darwinian biology into service to justify extreme forms of meritocratic competition on the view that "weaker" individuals should die off. That social Darwinists perverted Darwin's findings in this way, or that Nazi doctors used them as specious rationalizations for eugenic programs, should hardly lead us to reject evolutionary biology because it is "deeply entwined" with the legacy of racial or class "supremacism" (though doubtless there is some Creationist who has tried this argument). Similarly, perhaps it was due to a set of accidental circumstances around the dawn of agriculture that western cultures advanced faster than others technologically which then freed up wealthy individuals for intellectual endeavors and led to the breakdown of the medieval version of the caste system earlier in Europe than elsewhere. Such an account could explain western scientific superiority (and resulting time for arts and humanities) by the 1500s without justifying European conquests. Jared Diamond has offered such an account in a series of influential publications, and he could hardly be called a colonialist.[6]

            Allen is aware of this sort of worry: she notes that, even if backward-looking progress has used for corrupt ideological purposes in the past, it might not be "merely ideological" (p.25). To illustrate this possibility, she briefly considers Thomas McCarthy's recent classic, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development. She concedes that McCarthy goes beyond Habermas's admission that judgments of progress are situated and fallible: McCarthy also emphasizes the need to remember the wrongs done "in the name of human development," and he understands the norms embedded in our tradition(s) in a "more modest and contextualist way than ...Habermas tends to" (pp.27). Allen's complaint is that McCarthy does not go far enough in "decolonizing critical theory" because he agrees with Habermas that modern law, markets, and public discourse have become unavoidable for practically everyone, and that we cannot but regard the linguistic / historicist turn – together with the reflexivity of "modern forms of discourse"  – as progressive, relative to which unreflective ways of life count as less advanced.

I find Allen's critique of McCarthy's position unconvincing. First, it is simply an empirical fact that the spread of modern legal systems and markets have brought with them attempts to justify these legal orders in to many of those most directly affected by them, especially in political contexts. Second, Allen follows James Tully in calling this kind of view "neo-Kantian imperialism:" this is a great example of ad hominem labeling, a dialectical fallacy that abounds throughout strands of the postmodern synthesis. We do not get the refute our opponent's positions in rational dialogue by name-calling, and it is high time that everyone in the philosophical world start publicly shaming postmodern authors whenever they indulge their nearly-fatal addiction to this rhetorical stunt (which should be left to speeches scripted by that modern-day Thrasymachus, Roger Ailes). It is just offensive and misleading to call a scholar like McCarthy "imperialist." This game of holier-than-thou one-upmanship is not how one should build a career or gain appointment to an endowed chair in academia.

Third, behind this label, Allen's substantive complaints seem to be that McCarthy's position is paternalist and open to non-western views only within the limiting frame of "posttraditional, hyperreflexive, modern discourse." In support of this idea, she cites McCarthy's claim that we cannot simply abandon the theory and practice of development in part because of the moral imperative to organize programs "on behalf of the poorest and most vulnerable societies...." (p.29, citing McCarthy p.226). Allen milks this phrasing, insisting that "on behalf of" implies that the poorest cannot represent themselves and need to be developed for their own good (p.30). This strikes me as forced: McCarthy clearly did not mean that western nations should impose some kind of economic or social development on the least-developed nations (LDCs); his past work implies that peoples in those nations should have a determining say in how resources are deployed to assist their societies. Moreover, McCarthy agrees with Thomas Pogge that it is partly because of the legacies of colonialism and ways in which the global economic system erected since Bretton Woods have advantaged developed western nations that we have a duty to aid the LDCs. In addition, Allen writes as if she did not know that it is the LDCs themselves which lobby hardest to stress rights to economic development in international documents and pledges (such as the new Sustainable Development Goals). Far from being some imposed western norm, economic and social development are given priority over individual rights in the (in)famous Bangkok Declaration, which some have read as a statement of "Asian values" in contrast to western demands for political rights and civil liberties. Thus the category of development in contemporary international debates can hardly be called "western" in any meaningful sense; nations around the world have also contributed to designing newer measures like the Human Development Index, which is meant to be benchmark against which we can measure progress that replaces the narrower "western" of GDP alone. Witness, for example, the government of Bhutan's version, which it calls the Gross National Happiness index. There is something inarticulate in this part of Allen's analysis.

Allen also follows Tully in suggesting that we "be willing to unlearn certain aspects of our taken-for-granted point of view in order to engage in a genuinely open way with various participants in debates about global modernity" (p.30). But should we unlearn McCarthy's second-order norms of tolerance on the basis of fundamental hermeneutic insights about fallibility, situated perspective, the need to test our assertions against the evidence and arguments of others, and the potential distortions of wishful thinking and backward rationalizations on which Allen herself clearly relies throughout – thus confirming his point? McCarthy concedes that first-order claims about progress in this or that domain, which will be partly empirical, are open to debate; and Allen agrees that a case might be made for such instances of first-order progress (p.33). But she appears to want us to be "willing to unlearn" the second-order "context-transcendent reconstruction of the values, ideals, and principles embedded in a discourse-ethical conception of practical reason" within which genealogical critique can take place according to McCarthy (pp.31-32).

It would help to have some example of what this might require in practice. To find clear examples of a worldviews to which the hermeneutic turn or willingness to self-examine is largely alien, we might have to turn to the most fundamentalist forms of religion, e.g. say Wahhabi Islam, or the Salafist ideology accepted by the Taliban, or the most ultra-literalist home-schooled Christian. Even the Amish, like Anabaptists, allow their children to experience alternatives at age 16-18 to enable informed choice; and even the most ultraorthodox Torah scholar has some awareness of other interpretations of Judaism. Of course we can learn from fundamentalists, but how could we really take on their second-order conception of reason as sheer obedience to commands revealed only to an illumined elite unless we had ourselves brainwashed, or took a magic pill to forget all that we have learned? And why ought we to be tolerant of these forms of intolerance and non-reflexive dogmatism? If we appeal here to any considerations of fallibility or need to consider further evidence or be open to the possibility of our own blind spots, we would just be reaffirming the very reasons why dogmatism is wrong. Tully want us to be "open" to closedness: but the value of openness endorses again precisely the norms of reasoning that these ultratheocratic conceptions of "reason" reject, or rather rule out ab initio without any argument. On this basis, I have argued elsewhere that Habermasians should not make room for such considerations allegedly based on revealed command alone into democratic discourse; that is the only consistent position. Thus in judging what counts as progress, we can at least cite the canons of reason implied in any rational inquiry into what counts as progress in this or that area of human life, culture, or society.

Allen almost concedes this, admitting that it may look like she is falling back on norms of tolerance, open-mindedness, and respect;  but she insists instead that she is recommending "a stance of modesty or humility, not superiority" (p.33). Yet this is still to say that modesty or humility are rationally better; they are signs of epistemic progress. This was McCarthy's point; all of Allen's criticisms of accomplished progress as potentially "colonialist" makes sense only if people deserve equal respect based on inherent human capacities, or perhaps their potential to develop the capabilities involved in practical reasoning and universal basic human emotions. Imperialist domination is only objectionable if it is wrong to manipulate people's sentiments and circumvent people's capacities for reasoning about collective action by coercion that has not been justified to them. And this is the basis of discourse ethics: it implies that a worldview according to which "might makes right" is primitive (to use an intentionally incendiary word). It is frustrating to see this obvious implication resisted, but perhaps Allen is held back by the fear that accepting it would involve claiming that western cultures or peoples are inherently superior. If so, that worry baseless: the norms which are constitutive of discourse seeking truth or better-warranted conclusions express the basic Axial distinction between justification and mere force, which apply to all cultures; they do not imply that westerners respect this distinction more than any other peoples in practice.

This brings me to a final point on the concept of historical progress. The strands of the postmodern synthesis that Allen is trying to use to reform Critical Theory can often be very thin on historical detail, including the histories of religion, which are needed to assess theories of history. For example, Reinhart Koselleck's studies, on which Allen draws, are too close to her own postmodern presuppositions to provide independent support: they lack some of the historical evidence that J.G.A. Pocock marshals in The Machiavellian Moment to show how a notion of secular progress emerged as early as the Italian humanist Renaissance when mundane time (the sæculum) was detached from the eschatological trajectory of divine history. Contrast the detailed evidence that Charles Taylor offers to show the modern value of autonomy traces to Occam, or how Francis Bacon in the early 17th century sought to use science as a tool to improve the ordinary lives of the common people, thereby valorizing the world of "everyday" existence. Koselleck repeats Karl Lőwith's thesis that "the modern notion of progress" (as if there were only one!) arises from replacing the religious eschaton with an intraworldly telos (p.7). But Allen says nothing about Hans Blumenberg's robust and imposing counterargument to Lőwith in his defense of the idea of "simple progress" in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age – an argument that depends on a philosophy of history only completed in his mythography, Work on Myth. Despite the glaring relevance of Blumenberg for Allen's topic, this omission is not her fault; for postcolonial theory spins its victimological master-narrative without sufficient awareness of empirically richer scholarship on the history of ideas because so much of this work, especially in comparative mythography, had a structuralist caste (as I have argued elsewhere).

In sum, if Critical Theory ultimately requires a philosophy of history, as Heidegger's work implies, we cannot get it from French poststructuralism, which refused even to acknowledge the importance of comparative mythography. The historiographical theories to which Allen is heir are simply nonstarters for the few scholars today who really know enough to judge cross-cultural intellectual history on the largest scales.[7] She is in good company: most scholars within Critical Theory since its inception judge philosophies of history on the basis of a simplified picture of the history of ideas (and their interactions with other causal factors) that is at least two orders of magnitude less complex than Pocock's, Taylor's, Blumenberg's, or Eliade's; even Heidegger's was one order of magnitude less than needed. I will say just a bit more on this theme in relation to the Axial Age idea in the next section.

 

IV. Allen's Critique of Habermas and Honneth: from the Axial Turn to Gay Marriage. Because Allen objects to invoking accomplished progress as a ground for a normative system, she is in effect also rejecting pragmatist metanormative theory, although she does not identify it in these terms: Habermas and Honneth both claim that the "modern, European, Enlightenment moral vocabulary and moral ideals are neither merely conventional nor grounded in some a priori, transcendental conception of pure reason" (p.14). She agrees with their suspicion of rationalist foundationalism, but not with the idea, which they appear to share with Dewey and perhaps the later Rawls, that an ongoing process of learning and discovery yielding more effective solutions to social problems is an important criterion of practical "validity." Yet the potential connection with pragmatist theory is important because that approach has not usually been accused of imperialism, and it might be bolstered today by the findings of game theory, e.g. that some forms of cooperation are better than others at solving certain collective action problems.

            Allen argues that Habermas's theory of modernity and social progress is at least part of the justification of his discourse ethics (p.66). I find her reading fairly persuasive, although Habermas certainly stressed his way of replacing Marx's philosophy of history more in his early writings, such as Communication and the Evolution of Society and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. In any case, I will simply assume here that her interpretation is largely correct, although she admits some ambiguity in his system.[8] Her central worry remains that Habermas is reconstructing "the intuitive knowledge of a very specific group of people, namely 'competent members of modern societies,'" whose implicit norms are not universal across history or culture (p.51).[9] This is a reasonable concern, given Habermas's stated aim of putting "critical theory on a sound normative footing" (p.52). Still, a bigger problem may be Habermas's need to prove his claim that communicative action or the rational weight of better ideas can change minds and thus social institutions (p.45). This key claim has global import extending beyond the modern period in Europe, but it is at odds with Blumenberg's neo-Darwinian theory of history and others that focus on material causes. I think he is correct, as cases like the persuasive weight of Locke's Second Treatise and the Federalist Papers show, but Habermas and his followers need to support this key historical thesis with more evidence. On the other hand, to answer Allen's concern, perhaps Habermas should make the stronger transcendental claim that the implicit presuppositions of communicative action  are universal to all joint practical reasoning aimed at truth (or warrant by the best evidence), which must be a cooperative endeavor: this held as much for Socrates and Confucius as for westerners today and for Azande villagers debating evidence of witchcraft (on this, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, ch.6, "Imaginary Strangers" ).

If Habermas needs a theory of historical advances in the past to support his formal pragmatics (derived from Alexy), and thus his principles D and U, I want to briefly suggest that he needs to claim much less for European "modernity" than Allen thinks he needs and actually does claim. In particular, a better theory of the so-called "Axial" transition at the dawn of monotheistic religions could be sufficient for this purpose. As Allen notes, Habermas now traces the turn towards reflexivity back to the transformations of the Axial Age (p.72); but Habermas, Taylor, and others do not spell out all the aspects in the Axial transition through which many cultures passed at different points in chronological time. When adequately explained, the Axial paradigm-shift points towards the possibility of a universal stage-wise development. In each instance, the Axial shift involves the emergence of a kind of goodness or value that is distinct from outward success in battle (or power); virtue becomes an inward trait less subject to fortune than is the charisma and luck of the aristocratic leaders; social roles are assigned more according to acquired merits than by birth-caste; justice comes to refer to the common good; and the image of the gods shifts accordingly, so that the divine will accords with what is objectively good rather than determining what is good by free decree. In short, might no longer makes right: the divine principle is no longer limited to cosmogonic power; it embodies ethical goodness. This is the sea-change that Nietzsche tried so desperately to tar in the Genealogy of Morals by misrepresentating it as a process of "ressentiment;" he yearned for the pre-Axial view of virtú as power in Pindar and Machiavelli. Foucault's attempt to deny the intrinsic differences between power and reason is a similar attempt to undo the Axial enlightenment. But total return to the Cave is impossible while any historical memory endures.

This short sketch should clarify why I think a historical theory of the Axial turn may be enough for Habermas's main purposes: while the postmodern views that he opposes attempt to rejuvenate Nietzsche's reversion to a pre-Axial paradigm, the Axial shift at its core is the recognition of reason as distinct from mere force or coercion. This is the basis for the kind of communicative action whose implicit norms Habermas is reconstructing, which can be found throughout the world, even when other aspects of European modernity such as Cartesian epistemic reflection are less in evidence. All complaints about colonialism or imperialism are in that sense Axial; they are objections to unjustified impositions by the more powerful on the less powerful –impositions that the Sophists and Nietzsche would take to be self-justifying. The Axial is not Eurocentric; it is not limited to a "very specific group of people" in history, nor even to Judeo-Christian roots. It is found everywhere that cultures have moved beyond the divine right of absolute monarchs, or beyond rule of elders who are empowered simply because they are elders rather than for any objective wisdom they embody.

This also provides a response to the challenge that Allen cites from Dipesh Chakrabarty, who claims that dialogical openness to "non-Western others" requires a stance that does not structure the encounter according to any prior implicit commitments (pp.75-76). The Axial reference point suggests that there will always be shared implicit commitments, unless the "other" simply holds that his power rules without limit. And that stance is not a non-Western culture; it is simply the root of limitless violence that returns in various individuals and epochs among all cultures everywhere – in Metternich as much as Genghis Khan, in Assad even more than among the Aztec priests. When Chakrabarty objects that designating someone as "premodern" may be nothing but a gesture of power (p.79), he is clearly relying on the Axial distinction between justification and coercion (otherwise, what would be wrong with a power-gesture?). To reject a pre- or anti-Axial view as primitive, then, cannot be to do it any kind of "wrong" (the right-wrong distinction itself being an Axial category).To want openness and dialogue is already to have embraced the Axial turn.

Things are a bit more complicated with Honneth, Allen convincingly argues that he justifies the normative force of his conditions for "full ethical self-realization" within social relations by holding that this kind of self-realization is the outcome of a historical progression (pp.81-82). Although Honneth does not say it, she takes this to imply that modern Western societies are "developmentally superior" not only to feudal European orders but to currently existing nonmodern societies (p.83) – although she had mentioned Habermas's and McCarthy's arguments that no current societies actually are totally nonmodern. To this, we might ask, "superior in what sense?" If Allen is correct, there must be some goods that the developmental process delivers in Honneth's view that are not (unlike the goods of self-realization) explained by it: for the former is supposed to explain the importance of self-realization? The accumulation of knowledge or epistemic capital over time is one possibility (p.87), as are goods of non-domination (suggesting a potential link to Phil Pettit's republicanism). Non-domination means that more relations of power are seen as having to be justified (p.88), which amounts to a deepening of the Axial shift in my sense. The Axial transformation also supports Honneth's Habermasian claim that ideas can move history: "the rational achievements of human beings" can be incorporated into social practices (p.109).  Even Williams' point that an acceptance does not count as fully voluntary if it is "produced by the coercive power that is supposedly being justified" (p.104) derives from the Axial distinction.

As Allen shows, however, Honneth has rejected transcendental and constructivist justifications of the norms central to his critical theory; instead he aims to reconstruct the "values and norms that have been immanently justified through the historical learning process – that is,...values that are embodied in our enduring social institutions and practices," including especially "freedom understood as autonomy" (p.92). Because Honneth focuses on the expanding potential for self-realization of an autonomous "self," the values on which he grounds critical norms go beyond what the Axial turn by itself can justify. They also depend, as Allen argues, on aspects of Honneth's moral psychology, including his basic drives "for recognition and inclusion," without which we suffer (p.117), and the importance of intimate relationships (p.99). I do not think his moral psychology or his Hegelian criteria for genuinely valid versus "merely accepted" norms are sufficient for his purposes: both are subject to problems of manipulated consent and adaptive preferences, as illustrated in the "Taliban woman" case (see Marina Oshana's work for details). But Allen's criticism is instead that Honneth is caught on the horns of a dilemma: if these conditions based on his philosophical anthropology hold only within specific forms of "ethical life," they succumb to the charge of conventionalism; but if they are meant to be "context-independent and universal," then they violate Honneth's pledge to base normativity within the immanent social world. I agree; this analysis is one of the strongest parts of Allen's book.

However, this chapter also contains Allen's discussion of gay marriage, which is one of the strangest subsections. In Freedom's Right, Honneth takes the legal recognition of gay marriage to be a further step in moral-political progress (p.89). Allen concedes that "if I side with the expansion of marriage rights for gays and lesbians," this means that I think it better than the institutional and social alternatives according to "some normative principle or value;" moreover, it "may very well mean that I am committed to some understanding of the possibility of moral or political progress" such as equality before the law (p.97). But if so, then it will surely also be possible to recognize past instances of progress on the same scale, e.g. the 14th Amendment – confirming again that her main objection cannot be to the possibility of progress accomplished in the past per se. Rather, she objects to relying on this progressive tendency to ground the moral claims of modernity. Allen objects that this is not self-evidently progress; Honneth assumes too much here. In particular, Honneth "clearly takes committed, monogamous, long-term relationships as a the paradigm cases for intimate relationships" (p.99) which lays him open to a "queer-left" critique.

Honneth certainly needs to strengthen his moral psychology with a fuller account of the structures of caring and love that could help defend the legal privileges given to marriage as a protection for long-term monogamous commitments. But I cannot agree with Allen that Honneth's perception of progress in this case is "heteronormative" because it "privileges a bourgeois-romantic conception of heterosexual marriage," or that it is "homonormative" in privileging "those queer relationships that most closely approximate to this [hetero] ideal" (p.100). First, this is another instance of tendentious, question-begging labeling.. Second, Honneth's view privileges long-term monogamous relationships over brief and loose encounters among both heterosexual and homosexual couples in the same way; there is no evident reason to think that long-term monogamy is essentially "heterosexual," and I think this suggestion demeans committed love among homosexual couples by suggesting that they are just trying to fulfill some "hetero" social-script. If some responded to this aspersion on their motives with rude expletives, I could hardly blame them; for it seems analogous to the execrable claim that a black man who seeks higher education is just "acting white." Third and similarly, there is no good reason to consider committed monogamous relationships "bourgeois" (that is, unless we wish to take Marx's own hurtful affair as an ideal). Modern canons of romance originated from the courtly love genre in the 13th and 14th centuries, long before the bourgeois existed; and romantic ideals were further developed by 18th and 19th century European novelists like Jane Austen precisely to be critical of bourgeois marriage for family connections, to which marriage for love is the antithesis. To call romance "bourgeois" is to reveal ignorance of the history of ideas and practices. Fourth, I fear that postmodern critics of monogamy may not realize that it has been one of the most egalitarian aspects of modern societies. Perhaps they will realize this when the norm has broken down entirely and 10% of people have four or five simultaneous partners while the worst-off 40% have no partner.

To be fair, Allen is not opposing gay marriage here; her worry is about the implication that our "late modern, European-American form of ethical life is superior to those forms of life that do not tolerate or accept gay marriage" (p.100). I concur with this concern, at least insofar as putting gay marriage on the top of the human rights agenda risks alienating a large majority of people in many non-western cultures who feel like westerners are trying to impose extreme sexual mores on them. There is a large spectrum of attitudes towards gay relationships. It is one thing to insist that non-hereto individuals be free from physical abuse, legal sanctions, and or even social ostracism. But when western gay lobbies try to make the step from civil unions to gay marriage as important as the rights to basic security and privacy, they simply look selfish and make it easy for dictators to portray human rights in general as a slippery slope to debauchery. Yet this elementary strategic concern about how best to advance the cause of human rights in a world full of dictators who know how to play on fears of 'western sexual corruption' is not Allen's point. Instead, she follows Jasbir Puar's suggestion that "heteronormativity and nationalism have been intertwined over the last twenty years," and that people use the "greater cultural and legal recognition for homosexuality" to underwrite the "the national and transnational agendas of US imperialism" (p.101).

Here we have reached a new horizon in the absurd; Puar's statement sounds like something right out of Putin's long list of bombastic lies. Of course, some westerners may derive a smug sense of cultural superiority from their nations' acceptance of gay relations or even gay marriage. But most informed Americans and Europeans realize that this is a very recent phenomenon in our cultures that is probably opposed to differing degrees by almost half our populations. They do not "disavow homophobia" at home by "projecting it onto other spaces" (p.102); this claim is merely evidence of Puar's paranoia. And I cannot recall anyone inside or outside American politics arguing that our greater recognition of gay rights is evidence of a moral superiority that gives us the right to go to war to promote American trade interests; this suggestion is inane. Certainly western politicians have sometimes called on nations like Saudi Arabia and Uganda to stop jailing and threatening to execute practicing gays, but no one has suggested this as a reason even for trade sanctions (though maybe it should be). Russia has certainly combined heteronormativity and nationalism in recent years, but Putin's manipulation of the Russian Orthodox Church to support his über-nationalist agenda is apparently not Puar's target. Even more bizarre is Allen's claim that our acceptance of monogamous, committed homosexual relationships marginalizes or excludes "other sexual minorities, especially racially or ethnically marked and working class queers..." (p.102). I'm not quite sure what this means: is she suggesting that western cultures approve gay relationships only among rich white yuppies?

Overall, this section is the kind of thing that gives Foucaltian postmodernism a bad name: it feels like the author is straining to be more avant-garde than the mainstream voices in favor of gay marriage by weaving sophisticated associations between ideas and attitudes that insinuate previously unsuspected "relations of power" with potentially sinister implications. Readers in this genre are expected to be impressed by such insinuations, just as they are expected to shiver at the amazing profundity when the text detects a "gap" in ordinary thinking that allegedly reveals its "repressed other" or unconscious dominations. So a reasonable worry about inferring cultural superiority from acceptance of gay marriage is swamped among non-sequiters drawn from contingent associations. That nations which recognize gay rights have also been imperialist in the past does not suggest any nefarious "intertwining" or "intersection" between accepting gay marriage and "cultural imperialism" (p.103), let alone political imperialism. We should beware of such "inter" terminology: like tropes of "entanglement" in postcolonialist works, they generally signal that an invalid inference from accidental juxtapositions is probably coming next.

 

V. Allen's Critique of Forst and her own Alternative. As with Habermas and Honneth, Allen gives a clear account of Forst's approach to critical theory, distinguishing their positions in a way that should be helpful to newcomers as well as interesting to old hands in these debates. Forst stresses that reconstructing a conception of the right from "familiar conceptions" cannot be what validates it; instead, the basis must lie in "the demands of practical reason itself" (pp. 123-24). He agrees with McCarthy that, however the concept of progress has been misused in the past, it remains an imperative demanded by those suffering systemic wrongs: "the critique of oppressive or colonizing notions of progress itself presumes that self-determination is normatively desirable" (pp.127-28), or that mere coercion is wrong (put in more general Axial terms). Forst's basic right to justification, as Allen describes it, is similar to Tim Scanlon's basic contractualist principle: valid norms must pass tests of reciprocity and generality (pp.129-30). However, this means that Forst inherits Scanlon's problem that what count as a "good reason" for rejecting a proposed norm must be based on values other than the overarching right to justification or universalizability requirement. As Allen explains, Forst expects first-order reasons to be tested for universalizability to come from our identities and communities in the form of "ethical" values that are limited or filtered by the moral criteria (p.133). This allows for a certain level of context-sensitivity, as Allen notes, in the verdicts arising from application of the basic moral requirement in different societies. The self-understandings and practices of different legal and informal communities affect what claims are brought to the table, within the limits of "a certain set of minimal moral norms" recognizing the status of all human beings (pp.134-35). In this regard, Forst's notion of "contextualist universalism" as a recursive and discursive interpretation of such moral limits bears fruitful comparison with Benhabib's notion of "democratic iterations."

            To this, Allen raises the reasonable worry that claims about "what is means to be a practical reasoner" at all can be arbitrary or universalize what is really a parochial view. Who is the "we" whose practical use of reason is being reconstructed here, and does this focus deny value in embodied affects, emotions, or imagination (p.137)? To such familiar concerns (Alasdair MacIntyre posed the same question), it seems that Forst might respond as Christine Korsgaard has by insisting that our use of practical reason in making choices to act always inevitably endorses its own value – not as a substitute for all other values but the value inherent in being an evaluator of other value-perceptions that we may get from many other psychological resources. On this view, we can come to see that moral reasons are autonomous or naturally endorsed, not forced on us. Instead Allen argues, following Adorno, that Forst is too sanguine about the moral motive aiming at reciprocal fairness for its own sake, and that children have to be socialized with a degree of coercion. , I think empirical psychology has undermined such doubts about fairness-motivation. Even if she is correct that Forst needs to say more about socialization, we need not conclude with Foucault that "the space of reasons is...always already the space of power" (p.143). Most children require external incentives to learn math beyond simple counting, but that does not make mathematical truths into artifices of power; it merely shows that developing the mental capacities needed to understand and appreciate these truths at first requires other incentives, which can be left behind when the capacities are developed.

            To clarify, I'm hardly denying that children's identities and values are shaped by all sorts of values, often including some that decolonial and communitarian critiques legitimately question. The issue is whether there are sources of upbringing that are autonomy-enabling, or whether all the ultimate sources of reasons for which we might act lack any intrinsic authority beyond their causal efficacy in our psyches. Allen's goal is not to plumb the depths of this difficult question, but she seems to infer from the mere existence of this question that Forst's solution cannot work. Instead, I suggest that the burden of proof goes both ways: it makes little sense to criticize "dominance" and "hegemony" if there is no possible alternative (p.143). How can colonialism be "pernicious" (p.146) if reasoning as we know it is merely a conduit of forces that operate on our minds?

            Similarly, I am unmoved by Allen's suggestion that criticisms from "feminist, queer, postcolonial, and critical race theorists" demonstrate that "the Kantian Enlightenment conception of practical reason explicitly or implicitly excludes, represses, or dominates" whatever is symbolically associated with non-reason, including "black, queer, female, colonized, and subaltern subjects" (p.137). It is hard not to roll one's eyes when a such a litany of typecast victims is invoked to support such extreme claims (maybe she should have added a couple more – how about welfare-recipients or 'alter-incomed'?). Surely the error lies in not in the idea of universalizing conceptions of fairness but in the symbolic associations of such "marginalized" subjects with the irrational. Allen wants to critique such offensive associations and at the same time still rely on them to damn Kantian moral criteria as oppressing the "subaltern" other. Similarly, it is nonsense to claim that Forst exaggerates "reason's emancipatory potential and underemphasizes the subordinating power of justification," which rationalizes dominations of "female, queer, and subaltern subjects as irrational" (p.147). For obviously any conception of reason that did this would not really be justificatory: thus Allen is attacking a straw man. Moreover, I'm forced to repeat that such complaints clearly invoke ideals of non-domination and equal respect that cannot be explained without some conception of reason or an inherently justifying source of motives.

            In addition, while Allen reiterates the familiar complaint that Kantian practical reasoning is too "abstract" (perhaps conflating abstraction with universalization), these grievances on behalf of 'Reason's others' are themselves incredibly vague. Is the problem that Kant gives too little role to emotions or sentiment in moral thinking? If so, perhaps that can be corrected by a better version of Enlightenment practical reason, as much work in the last 50 years has argued. That critics in several genres have repeated these accusations so often that they have become utterly formulaic to the point of sounding canned does not "show" that they are correct, or that our previous attempts to formulate practical reason have erred by being racist or exclusionary (p.138). There is a kind of master-metaphor at work here, not only in Allen's texts but throughout her genre. It could be pictured a bit like the images of Atlas holding up the world, or the bright gardens of the masters being held up by the slave underworld in Fritz Lang's famous Metropolis. This time, the postcolonialist master-image puts Enlightenment Reason in place of the masters, implicitly depending on the suppressed Otherworld that subtends Reason: Atlas, or the slaves below, are now non-white, non-western, colonized, queer, 'differently abled,' or whatever the most fashionable latest victim-category may be.

            I have three worries about the surprising amount of recourse that recent postmodern authors make to this master-image and the great seriousness with which it is now taken not only among many philosophers, but also sociologists, literary theorists, and their many undergraduate students. First, it is simplistic: no such image can come close to capturing the complexity of real life. The symbolism can be helpful, but only up to a point (as Lang would have been the first to say). Second, like a label, it operates as a rhetorical strategy that substitutes for argument. Simply placing Reason in the oppressor-role in this image provides zero evidence that Reason is oppressive: it merely encourages readers to interpret any perceived injustice along these lines while ignoring rival, potentially much better, explanations. Third, as I noted above, it cultivates a kind of victimology that also aestheticizes the victim-categories in a disturbing way that is nevertheless hard to describe. Oppressed groups, reified into symbols, are so positioned that they seem to verify the poststructuralist idea that dominant concepts self-deconstruct or reveal through their internal aporias what lies beneath them, the undescribably different. At some point in the late 20th century, people hit on the idea of putting oppressed "others" (borrowing Levinas's coinage) into the role of this subtextual level of non-meaning on which the meaning of rational thought supposedly depends despite denying/suppressing it – the underlevel that can be glimpsed through the cracks in its semantic edifice. [10] This weird substitution seems to have been made almost by sleight of hand; by subtle finesse, the Derridean idea of aporias in texts was turned into the master-image of postcolonialism, which has had an almost magical power on the humanities ever since. How this could happen without widespread howls of protest is a good question for genealogical investigation.

            All that said, Allen may be correct that Forst gives an inadequate account of power that focuses too much on "justificatory power" or putative rational persuasion, and assimilates variant forms of subordination to duress to which the agent in some sense voluntarily gives in (pp.148-49). Clearly not all power works through the "space of reasons" and subjects may be deformed or moulded to suit dominant elites in the very education that develops their capacities to reason (p.150). On the other hand, the Foucaultian conception of power might be too expansive in the other direction, treating every type of interpersonal influence as a kind of manipulation, thus implying that only a being that created itself ex nihilo could really be autonomous (which illustrates Foucault's debt to Sartre and Nietzsche). It becomes too easy on this view to assert "entanglements" or "intersections" between rational requirements for justification and this or that sort of alleged subordination, e.g. "implicit class bias" (p.152). Allen notes Forst’s apt countercharge that his critics belittle “subaltern subjects," and experience shows that people do not need to have research credentials to be able to muster many (sometimes complex) arguments. In any case, Allen admits that Forst may be correct that “no one owns the concept of justification, or even the language of European morality” (p.157); all cultures may employ justifications and take up moral concepts. She simply denies that we need Kantian practical reason to explain this, favoring what I’d call a notion of loose family resemblance between modes of justification or explanation in different cultures. If this is the correct interpretation, then what divides Allen from Forst and Habermas concerns an inference to the best explanation: they detect a “deep grammar” of implicit normative expectations that she apparently does not (I’ve tried to indicate why I think she should).

This brings me to Allen's own proposed way of explaining such values that can undergird critical assessments of power-relations within human society, which she approaches via the first generation of Critical Theory. Allen does a good job with both Adorno and Foucault in my estimation. Allen patiently explains that Foucault is not arguing that unreason, let alone madness, are the only source of "freedom." Rather, his point is to use moments of unreason to loosen up the grip of our “system of thought” on us, which helps enable freedom (p.182). Unreason “opens up and illuminates lines of gaps and fissures … in our historical apriori”(pp.182-83) – the same caesura trope – without claiming an Archimedean vantage outside of it. Similarly, Allen argues that . On her account, Adorno is also trying to modify Hegel’s conception of history, not ultimately denying any possibility of future progress; he holds that our current social order and “technologically oriented science” are contingent, not essential (p.172) – though he may believe that Enlightenment reason necessarily had to revert to domination and atrocity in some fashion or other. Perhaps Adorno thinks that Enlightenment reason contained the “germ of …regression” to barbarism because he equates it with instrumental reason or the cultivation of power over nature and other persons (p.167). Habermas and his successors have corrected this idea by distinguishing “communicative” from “strategic” rationality. She also argues that Foucault is not caught in the false dichotomy some have alleged, i.e. that either he writes the history of forms of reason from a privileged transcendent viewpoint, or his account is one of its many determined figures.

Still it is not evident why Adorno thinks that reason cannot be divided from power at least in principle, or what norms the later Foucault can appeal to in critiquing our current practices and modes of thought. If we cannot even outline the utopia to be brought about by the “radical transformation” because we are too corrupt, it could lead to anything. So this "radically reflexive and historicized critical methodology the understands critique as the wholly immanent and fragmentary practice of opening up lines of fragility and fracture within the social world" (p.203) seems purely negative or ultimately empty to me, despite this glowing rhetoric in which it is dressed up. Adorno, like Sartre, thought that "self-reflection" can replace moral categories (p.197); but that hope proved baseless. As Allen says, Foucault retains fidelity not to the Enlightenment’s “doctrinal elements but to its critical attitude” (p.191). That sounds good, but we should remember that the truly defining idea of all Enlightenment moral theory from Locke onwards was the inalienability of liberty, i.e. pace libertarian self-ownership, even voluntary slavery is not legitimate. Instead, Adorno and Foucault (like most scholars in the Critical Theory tradition), take “freedom” to be the central ideal of the Enlightenment (pp.195-96); but freedom without any limits inherent in its own constitutive conditions includes no inalienable rights. We confront here a central irony: there is a line from Nietzsche and Sartre to libertarianism (it was not for nothing that Ayn Rand admired Nietzsche). Honneth's and Forst's conceptions of agential autonomy, like Habermas's, instead have implicit moral limits built into them.

 

VI. Conclusion. In sum, Allen raises good questions about historical progress and offers helpful expositions of Habermas, Honneth, Forst, Adorno and Foucault. But in the end, I am not persuaded that the best way to "decolonize" Critical Theory, if this is what it needs, is to adopt a more partial, largely negative critical practice without any transcendental deduction of universal conditions of dialogue, mixing first-personal reconstruction and third-personal genealogy to "problematize" our practices.  Although Allen has conceded earlier that uses of Enlightenment moral theory and philosophy of history to justify imperialism might be contingent misuses, to support her alternative, she reverts to claiming an essential connection: "Enlightenment ideals are entangled with relations of colonial domination and epistemic violence, and not just as a function of their application;" there is "normative violence implicit in the norm of freedom itself, uncovering how the autonomy of the subject" depends on forms of domination.[11] This is where we descend into nonsense. Nazi scientists pioneered rocketry, and put forward initial designs for the German "Beetle" car: that does not make Volkswagen or European rocket science "entangled" with fascism in a way that damns astronauts or Volkswagen drivers. 

            Moreover, it is not clear what concrete alternative Allen has in mind here: should "opening up our normative commitments to radical questioning" include even considering a return to slavery, at least for those willing to sell themselves into it? Does the dual movement of inheriting the Enlightenment while "problematizing and decentering it, opening up a space for moving beyond it into an unknown and unknowable future" (p.205) mean that we could even reconsider the Genocide Convention?  If this criticism seems unfair, note that Allen clearly states that, while we retain our first-order commitments to "values of freedom, equality, and solidarity with the suffering of others," she proposes to understand such commitments as only justified "immanently and contextually ...rather than by appeal to their putatively context-transcendent character" (p.211). This certainly seems to imply that we have to respect other cultural contexts that radically challenge our own, such of those which judge it right to completely enslave women (e.g. the Taliban) or who think mass ethnic cleaning can serve legitimate purposes. Moreover, we have to be open to them for the paradoxical reason that not to respect their anti-Enlightenment "contexts" would be dominating or imperialist! If this is correct, I think it is a reductio ad absurdum of Allen's position. Contextualism sounds more flexible and hospitable to non-Western perspectives until we start to think about applications to difficult cases. Sometimes "humility" in ethical conviction is misplaced.

Perhaps this just means that Allen needs to discuss more examples to clarify how her view will work in practice. But the few cases she does mention do not provide much reassurance. For example, she follows Spivak in describing the British abolition of the "sati" ritual (widow-burning) in India as an instance of imperialism in which Indian women were caught in a double-bind: either they define themselves as subjects of Indian patriarchy, or they "allow themselves to be constituted as objects of imperialism" (p.153). On the contrary, Spivak's position itself seems highly condescending, perhaps even betraying a hint of Brahmanism:[12] for surely plenty of Indian women were able to take advantage of the new British law abolishing sati for their own reasons, quite apart from whatever reasons the British colonial masters had for it. The Spivak/Allen account is even unfair to plenty of the British in India at the time. While postcolonial theorists may love to lump them altogether as if they were a monolithic group united only by great evils, this is just a stereotypical reification of a large variety of different individuals who had different motives and beliefs. Imagine a British junior officer in his early 20s who had recently arrived in India, his head filled with all kinds of "orientalist" ideas about the exotic East, witnessing the actual burning of a widow on her husband's funeral pyre. Imagine him two weeks later using his troops, guns loaded, to disperse a funeral gathering before it can conduct another sati ritual; imagine him giving the widow sanctuary instead. Must his motives according to Spivak and Allen be some awful mixture of European supremacist ideology and thoughts of "white man's burden?" Or could he just have been so shocked at the first sati, so infinitely horrified by the woman's melting flesh and her soul-searing shrieks of agony that he vomited up everything he ate for two days after, barely slept more than an hour at a time for a week, and came out of this life-altering experience absolutely determined to prevent anything like that ever happening again, even if the effort cost him his life? I would put this down to the element of common humanity in the man, emerging from behind the overlay of orientalism. A postcolonialist ideology that is incapable of imaging such simply human empathy or attributing it to an early 20th century European junior officer is itself a tortured kind of view, requiring us to contort or minds more grotesquely than an Iron Maiden twists the human body. It truly merits the label of "ideology." Similarly, any view, postcolonial or otherwise, that does not recognize that corruption and plain bad habits can invade and take root in any culture is naive.

Of course, there is plenty of precedent for the sort of contextualist and coherentist epistemology that Allen recommends (while distinguishing these approaches). It is helpful to include "non-discursive elements" in the web that forms a person's or group's operative world-picture. And perhaps, following Wittgenstein and Rorty, we can get away with allowing a certain amount of tension in our webs of belief (and attitudes and practices), and deny any hierarchy among the "array of contexts" to which justification is indexed (pp.212-14). But as I noted, Allen rejects the criterion that pragmatist theory adds to such contextualist approaches, i.e. looking for a direction of progress towards overcoming disagreements; she is also suspicious of the coherentist's related drive towards unity among varying world-pictures. This weakens the contextualist approach's ability to rule much out. Allen may be technically correct that this contextualist theory could be construed as a metanormative account or moral epistemology that is consistent with holding moral norms that are universal in scope (pp.210-12 and pp.215-17). But that would require us to say that we apply such moral norms to many people whom we still believe may be justified in rejecting them, which makes it hard to see how this view could help resolve any institutional questions. Moreover, Allen's metanormative version of contextualism would reduce the vices that she has attributed to more Habermasian critical theories to merely epistemic errors without an ethical aspect (in the broadest sense). It is clear, however, that she follows the majority of postcolonial theorists in claiming that there is something ethically wrong with the views that she is critiquing: imperialism and colonialism are moral categories. For that reason, she will have trouble deciding what to say about some non-western worldviews that may not only espouse different first-order norms but also insist on their unquestionable status at the metanormative level. Can such worldviews "speak" to Allen or will she have to condemn them as dogmatic, immodest, and willing to impose their views by force – just like some followers of classical Enlightenment rationalism or Hegel's Absolute?

This metanormative - normative split also seems ironically similar to the ideal-real split that she condemns in Habermas, without any proof that it can save us from complicity with neo-imperialism. For, how is purely immanent critique without appeal to an über-context supposed avoid "sympathiz[ing] with authority" in the way that transcendentally-based critique is alleged to (p.215)? Is epistemic modesty supposed to keep us pure of entanglement with power-relations when inaction can be just as bad as action? Epistemic humility might move us to omit intervening or take no positive action in cases of massive injustice, thus leaving the victims to their fate. Again, more cases would be helpful: e.g. what should postcolonialists say about Syria now?

This brings us back to Allen's challenge that Habermas, Honneth, and Forst cannot sustain the distinction between the ideal demands of Enlightenment normativity and its real historical uses, which supposedly bound up with imperialism (p.206). But it is not clear what her evidence is that ideal requirements cannot (even in principle) be framed or stated without the taint of power-relations, even if our finite minds will probably fail to meet this ideal. As I suggested in the previous section, one problem with this impurity thesis (as we might call it) is that the idea of "power" itself is not sufficiently clarified. As we saw, this is directly related to the problem in autonomy theory that if any kind of causal link or psychological influence between persons constitutes a potentially dominating "power-relation," we have simply begged the question against the possibility of non-domination, or of inherently authoritative sources of agency. That is to assume from the get-go that Nietzsche and Thrasymachus were correct, while Socrates and the Axial turn were mistaken. Allen does not aim for such a pan-skeptical debunking conclusion, but that is where we are led unless the concept of non-justificatory "power" is delimited in some coherent way. I do not see the resources for that clarification in Allen's metanormative approach. But as this review has hopefully shown, more is at stake here than the persuasiveness of one book's arguments. Allen's book is exemplary within the postcolonial genre, offering some of the clearest articulations available of its central claims in opposition to Habermas and his successors. Thus the problems in her work suggest a bad prognosis for the genre as a whole. If Critical Theory is to have a promising future, in my view, it has to separate itself more decisively from the rhetoric, imagery, and myths circulated by the postmodern synthesis that is so popular today. Nietzsche and the Enlightenment are enemies between which compromise is impossible: we have to choose between them.



     [1]See Bill Martin, "Eurocentrically Distorted Communication," in Perspectives on Habermas, ed. Lewis E. Hahn (Open Court Publishing Company, 2000): 411-21, p.412. This contrasts with Levinas's sense of "otherness" as ethically demanding alterity.

     [2]William McBride, "Habermas and the Marxian Tradition," in Perspectives on Habermas: 425-44, pp.426-32.

     [3]I discuss this issue in a reply to Fabrice Weissman of MSF France: “In Defense of the Responsibility to Protect: A Response to Weissman,” Criminal Justice Ethics 35.2 (Routledge, March, 2016): 1-29.

     [4]Allen comments a bit on this context in her Preface, in which she describes the difficulty of bridging the worlds of Habermasian critical theory and postcolonial theory (e.g. p.xv).

     [5]See Perspectives on Habermas, p.418 and p.429 (citing Agnes Heller).

     [6]For example, Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel. Allen suggests that she can bracket or set aside issues of scientific-technological progress (p.10), but the Diamond example shows why this kind of progress might be causally connected, e.g. through economic advances, with other kinds of social and ethical progress. Moreover, the sorts of factors that Diamond cites jibe fairly well with Marx's view of what moves history, though Weber reminds us not to overlook changes in belief arising from religious reflection and conviction as another partly autonomous source.

     [7]And I certainly do not claim to be one of them: I only read them with admiration.

 

     [9]However I think Allen is unfair in picking on Habermas's use of the term "civilizing" for the West's relation "to the rest of the world" (p.68). His suggestion in The Divided West (p.16) is instead that the West has been uncivil in spreading the forces of unfettered capitalism. He is asking western nations to play a more positive role, e.g. via aid.

     [10] Ironically, Derrida seems to have acquired this image Nietzsche's description of  the pre-axial "greatness" of a master-class being resentfully suppressed by "slave morality" (i.e. Judaism and Christianity).

     [11]Allen also quotes Jay Bernstein's claim that, given, the way that Enlightenment ideas were "borne by and/or embodied in practices that are dominating, the ideals themselves must bear that dominating moment" (p.204). This is a textbook non-sequiter employing fallacious damnation by association. To fall for this kind of canard should disqualify us from receiving even an undergraduate degree in Philosophy.

     [12]This tone is perhaps evident in Spivak's belief that "illiterate peasantry, Aboriginals, and the lowest strata of the ...proletariat" cannot be heard by those in positions of power (p.154). On the contrary, I side with Charles Dickens' view that the poorest do make appeals that elites willfully ignore, and which members of the elite know at some level even when they try to keep the "subaltern" out of their sight.