James Bohman

(1954 - 2021)

The essays in this volume reflect on and expand Frankfurt School critical theory as reformulated after World War II by Karl-Otto Apel, Jürgen Habermas, and others. Frankfurt School critical theory since the pragmatic turn has become a richer source of critical analysis that is at the same time socially and politically more effective. The essays are dedicated to Thomas McCarthy, who has done perhaps more than any other scholar to introduce English-speaking audiences to contemporary German critical theory.The book is organized into three parts. Part one deals with social theory and the rational basis of communication, including basic issues raised by the pragmatic turn. Part two examines conceptions of autonomy and the self. Part three deals with political theory, focusing on problems stemming from sociocultural pluralism. Together, the essays provide an overview of the latest developments in Frankfurt School critical theory as it responds to the challenges of pragmatism and social pluralism

In this discussion of Seyla Benhabib’s Claims of Culture, I defend a more pluralist conception of deliberative democracy and a stronger conception of the cosmopolitan content of human rights. I will discuss three main issues: first, problems of incommensurability and deep conflict; second, the role of impartiality and normative constraints embodied in the ‘syntactic’ and ‘semantic’ interpretations of the deliberative formula ‘reasons that all could accept’; and third, the differences in our conceptions of cosmopolitanism and the status of rightless persons, particularly as illustrated through the example of the European Union. In the first two cases, I argue that the democratic minimum required for the resolution of second-order conflicts without domination demands a weaker interpretation of procedural norms of deliberation; in the case of rightless persons, I argue that the ‘right of hospitality’ that Benhabib employs is not robust enough and that there is more content to the conception of human rights that is applicable to the fate of refugees, asylum seekers, and other stateless persons.

Although eighteenth-century Federalists, including James Madison, have been associated with the very contemporary idea of a transnational political order, the argument that the modern state with its centralised authority and supreme power poses a threat to liberty was already a subject of discussions during the period. The American Constitution was intended to establish a new political order, rather than a loose federation or an enlarged state. The Framers were not alone in their preoccupation with a transnational order; the German philosopher Immanuel Kant struggled with the same issues of liberty and security in his political essays. This chapter examines how Madison and Kant grapppled with the problem of transnational order in the context of democracy and republicanism. It looks at the issues addressed by Kant and Madison that are closely related to those discussed today, including diversity, popular sovereignty and political violence. The chapter suggests that Kant and Madison, along with many other republicans of the time, explored the idea of government without resorting to the models of small-scale, ancient republics.

For Kant and many modern cosmopolitans, establishing the rule of law provides the chief mechanism for achieving a just global order. Yet, as Hart and Rawls have argued, the rule of law, as it is commonly understood, is quite consistent with "great iniquities." This criticism does not apply to a sufficiently robust, republican conception of the rule of law, which attributes a basic legal status to all persons. Accordingly, the pervasiveness of dominated persons without legal status is a a fundamental violation of the rule of law. This legal status can be understood in Kant's sense as an original "right to freedom," one that is not derived from or acquired by membership in a community or from citizenship. The realization of this kind of legal status can already be found in the "cosmopolitan constitutions" of many democracies, which include rights of persons (and not just citizens) to habeas corpus and other statuses that protect those vulnerable to domination. In order that all persons have the appropriate institutional space within which to exercise the powers of persons to address and make claims, institutions such as human rights courts to which those who lack legal status can appeal and be recognized are necessary for a form of the rule of law that is adequate to current circumstances

In this paper, I consider the recent resurgence of “evolutionary economics”—the idea that evolutionary theory can be very useful to push forward key debates in economics—and assess the extent to which it rests on a plausible foundation. To do this, I first distinguish two ways in which evolutionary theory can, in principle, be brought to bear on an economic problem—namely, evidentially and heuristically—and then apply this distinction to the three major hypotheses that evolutionary economists have come to defend: the implausibility of rational choice theory as an account of economic rationality, the idea that firms are autonomous economic agents, and the need for a more dynamic, less equilibrium-focused economic methodology. In each of these cases, I conclude negatively: the relevant evolutionary considerations neither suggest interesting and novel hypotheses to investigate further (the hallmark of heuristic devices) nor are backed up by the needed data to constitute genuine evidence. I end by distinguishing this criticism of evolutionary economics from others that have been put forward in the literature: in particular, I make clear that, unlike those of other critics, the arguments of this paper are based on epistemic—not structural—considerations and therefore leave more room for a plausible form of evolutionary economics to come about in the future.

Political liberals now defend what Rawls calls the “inclusive view” of public reason with the appropriate ideal of reasonable pluralism. Against the application of such a liberal conception of toleration to deliberative democracy “the open view of toleration is with no constraints” is the only regime of toleration that can be democratically justified. Recent debates about the public or nonpublic character of religious reasons provide a good test case and show why liberal deliberative theories are intolerant and fail to live up to democratic obligations to provide justifications to all members of the deliberative community. In a deliberative democracy, accommodations to religious minorities must be based on transformations in the current reflective equilibrium among the norms that make up the complex democratic ideal. This is not merely a conceptual enterprise of commensuration, since the need for any such transformation in standards of justification is due to changes in the nature of the polity itself, changes that in turn modify its regime of toleration.

In this paper, I provide a qualified defense of the claim that cognitive biases are not necessarily signs of irrationality, but rather the result of using normative standards that are too narrow. I show that under certain circumstances, behavior that violates traditional norms of rationality can be adaptive. Yet, I express some reservations about the claim that we should replace our traditional normative standards. Furthermore, I throw doubt on the claim that the replacement of normative standards would license optimistic verdicts about human rationality.

Derek Parfit’s long-awaited work On What Matters is a very ambitious, very strange production seeking to defend both a nonreductive and nonnaturalistic but nonmetaphysical and nonontological form of cognitive intuitionism or rationalism and an ethical theory (the Triple Theory) reflecting the convergence of Kantian universalizability, Scanlonian contractualism, and rule utilitarianism. Critics have already countered that Parfit’s metaethics is unbelievable and his convergence thesis unconvincing, but On What Matters is a truly Sidgwickian work, the implications of which largely remain to be worked out. Parfit does not go far enough in spelling out exactly what matters and why, what normative reasons we actually have, and where we should go from here, if we take him seriously.

This article investigates the status of Norbert Elias’s conception of the sociology of knowledge as the means to provide a new epistemological security for sociology. The author of the article argues that this translates into an effective critique of the underlaboring model of the relationship between philosophy and the social sciences, which is consistent with Elias’s attempt to consolidate his own sociological theory. Nevertheless, the author argues that Elias’s sociology of knowledge runs into problems in its attempt to evade the problem of relativism in explanation, and in its conception of human agency.

As developed by Sabel, Dorf and Cohen, and John Dewey before them, democratic experimentalism is based on the premise that current democratic practices are no longer able to deal with central and pressing social and political problems. Beginning with the criticism of democracy as command and control, Dorf and Sabel show how current democratic practices are part of the problem rather than the solution. Even as democratic experimentalists have successfully explored democracy beyond the state in the European Union, I argue that they have not fully transnationalized democracy or fully appreciated “the new circumstances of politics.” With the emergence of pervasive forms of interdependence, Rousseau’s conception of democracy as self legislation is no longer adequate, despite its cogent normative assumptions. Instead, the new transnational circumstances of justice suggest a stronger conception of democracy as self determination. In order to minimize domination and maximize self determination, cross-cutting constituencies must achieve a shared democratic minimum, through which democracy may once again become a means to justice

The debate about Habermas' use of the system and lifeworld distinction has not focused on the explanation of social pathologies that he offers, but rather only on conceptual problems with the theories that he uses. Twill argue that the explanation offered by his thesis that "systems colonize the lifeworld" fits the main criterion for adequacy for macro-micro explanation: because it establishes macro-micro linkage, it is at least potentially complete. Such an analysis fits the empirical approach to traditional debates between collectivists and individualists among macrosociologists. I shall apply this approach here in three steps. First, I shall use the controversy about functionalist explanation in the social sciences to develop the criterion of completeness for macrosociological explanations (1). Second, I shall generalize the conditions of adequacy for functionalist explanations to macrosociology as a whole and show that Habermas'explanation of the colonization of the lifeworld is at least potentially complete, as an explanation sketch that lacks empirical detail (2). Third, I shall show that this approach also requires that Habermas modify his overly Weberian claims about the effects of bureaucracy, since his stronger notion of reification is based on the incompletness in his explanation of this aspect of the micromacrolinkage (3). Moreover; a more complete account has clearer practical consequences for agency in the form of collective action.

Reviso tres maneras diferentes como los ideales de la democracia deliberativa han cambiado a la luz de las preocupaciones prácticas sobre su viabilidad, es decir, haciendo cada vez más importante el problema de cómo este ideal puede acercarse a sociedades caracterizadas por profundos desacuerdos, problemas sociales de enorme complejidad e instrumentos inoperantes en sus instituciones existentes. En primer lugar, las teorías de la democracia deliberativa enfatizan el proceso mismo de la deliberación, y no sus condiciones y procedimientos ideales y contrafácticos. En segundo lugar, los demócratas deliberativos se interesan cada vez más en los problemas de la institucionalización, en hacer del voto, la regla de mayorías, la representación, los tribunales y el derecho constitucional, instituciones más deliberativas, en pro de una mayor democracia directa. En tercer lugar, los deliberativistas se ocupan de examinar y comparar los diferentes escenarios y procedimientos de la deliberación, señalando problemas empíricos y obstáculos que no siempre pueden anticiparse al recurrir únicamente a argumentos conceptuales.

The article reconstructs three key concepts of Hans Vaihinger: the idea of mental fictions as self-contradictory, provisory, conscious, and purposeful; the law of the devolution of ideas stating that an idea oscillates between dogma, hypothesis, or fiction; and the underlying assumption about human consciousness that the psyche constructs thoughts around perceptions like an oyster produces a pearl. In a second, constructive part, these concepts are applied in a discussion of John Searle’s social ontologically extended theory of speech acts. The article introduces the Vaihingerian as-if to Searle’s account of declarations. The explanatory work in a model of social reality as Searle has proposed it rests on the ability to show a necessary connection between collective and individual intentionality facilitated through linguistic structure. The methodological individualism of the model requires that motivational assumptions about collective structures be realized in individual brains. The as-if stance of the declarer provides just this connection.