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):
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).
[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.
[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.