Jean-Philippe Deranty

Elizabeth Anderson and Axel Honneth both propound ‘relational’ models of equality and freedom to criticize mainstream distributivist theories of justice. Anderson does this by retrieving the republican and Honneth the socialist tradition. Yet both traditions also focused on another key concern of justice, namely ‘real equality’. The chapter begins by comparing Anderson’s and Honneth’s models, and what the overlaps and differences between them mean for issues of recognition and redistribution. In the second part, the chapter turns to the writings of Gracchus Babeuf, the most radical and consistent defender of ‘real equality’, to highlight shortcomings in Anderson’s and Honneth’s own theories of justice.

Christophe Dejours’ expert statement at the France Télécom trial made a strong impression on all those who observed and attended it. This impact can be traced all the way into the judges’ advice. This article seeks to identify what lies behind the capacity of the psychodynamics to touch people in such a way that they recognize themselves intellectually and affectively in its diagnoses and explanatory schemes. The main hypothesis is that this capacity stems from the theory’s psychosomatic dimensions. The first part contrasts Merleau-Ponty’s theory of embodiment with Dejours’ conception of the two bodies. This provides keys to understand how a theoretical discourse can resonate with other peoples’ experiences. The second part focuses on work experiences, in reference to Hegel’s analysis of work in his Philosophy of Right. The third part returns to Merleau-Ponty and with his help tries to articulate how theory can echo the affective sensing that contemporaries make of the political tensions and potentials characteristic of a particular historical time.

One strong objection to “equal payment for all” comes from a recognitive approach to justice. In that approach, modern individuals are entitled to make different kinds of justice claims, corresponding to different demands for recognition. On that basis, we should distinguish recognition that emphasises our equal moral standing, which typically ground demands for equal rights, from the recognition of the specific contributions an individual, or group of individuals, makes to social life. This second type of recognition, which German sociology and recognition theory refer to as Leistungsprinzip, the “achievement principle”, follows a non-egalitarian, meritocratic logic based on the valuation of distinct contributions. Such valuation is inevitably comparative, relating to the value of the individual “Leistung” for the collective, or some intrinsic characters of the performance, for instance its level of complexity, the learning or personal investment it might require. According to the achievement principle, it might appear that equal payment for all would breach a key normative underpinning of modern societies. It would rob individuals of a major source of recognition. Indeed, it would undermine a principle that was crucial in replacing old, unjust societies of order, where the distribution of economic and symbolic goods was based on birth and inherited power, with a more egalitarian social model where, ideally at least, individual effort is the sole criterion for social esteem. In this paper, I want to provide a rejoinder to a critique of equal payment for all based on the performance principle. I present three considerations for this rejoinder. First, I highlight the recurrent injustice and arbitrariness of social evaluations of achievements, which, for example, systematically undervalue “manual” versus “intellectual” labour. Second, I argue that even if a scale of achievements could be objectively established, this would not necessarily justify unequal distribution of economic goods, as other principles might override achievement in distributive allocation, namely individual need and the dependence of individual performance on social resources. The third argument is of a negative, preemptive kind and stresses that accepting unequal distribution of economic goods arguably leads to structures of social domination.

This introduction to the special section “Does Work Have a Future?” begins by reviewing the main ways work stands at the crossroads today. We identify three core disputes with the potential to disrupt the future of work but which also harbor resources for affirmative futures of work: the precariousness of work and lives under existing economic arrangements; the emergence of care work as a source of social and environmental value; and technological change. We then consider the demands for new meanings and new valuings that the manifold disputed status of work formulates. Finally, we highlight the contributions the four pieces making up this special section give to that momentous question of whether work has a future.

Axel Honneth, célèbre théoricien allemand de la reconnaissance qui s’inscrit dans la filiation de l’École de Francfort et notamment de Jürgen Habermas, et Jacques Rancière, éminent penseur français de la mésentente qui a rompu avec la tradition althussérienne, sont deux figures centrales du paysage intellectuel contemporain. Leurs pensées se situent dans deux traditions distinctes, mais elles ont toutes deux à voir avec le marxisme pris au sens large, qu’elles considèrent sous un angle critique. Les deux penseurs portent intérêt à des domaines spécifiques au sein de la philosophie et hors d’elle. S’ils partagent tous deux un souci du domaine politique, Axel Honneth se meut dans la philosophie sociale, la philosophie morale et la philosophie du droit ; il fait un usage important et réfléchi des sciences sociales. Jacques Rancière se tourne, pour sa part, vers l’histoire, l’esthétique et la littérature. Mais une confrontation entre leurs deux pensées paraît s’imposer, tant leurs modèles sont influents dans le champ des sciences sociales, de la théorie politique et de la philosophie critique aujourd’hui. Il s’agit de savoir si les paradigmes qu’ils mettent en avant pour critiquer la société, pour rendre raison de son évolution et des transformations qui doivent la rendre plus juste ou plus libre, le paradigme de la reconnaissance et celui de la mésentente, sont concurrents, s’ils sont exclusifs l’un de l’autre, ou s’ils sont compatibles.

This chapter examines the place of work in twentieth-century critical social theory, focusing on how work is understood in relation to social power and the possibility of emancipation. The first section centers on the Frankfurt School. First-generation Frankfurt philosophers conducted classical, Marx-inspired analyses of work as a key factor in economic exploitation and social stratification. They also developed original, long-historical, and anthropological perspectives that located the roots of social domination in the human necessity to work. This section concludes with a discussion of Axel Honneth, who significantly renewed analyses of power and emancipatory struggles by advancing a new model based on the notion of recognition. The second section turns to the post-Nietzschean approach of Michel Foucault, showing that work figures centrally across the major phases of his thought. While his disciplinary and biopolitical frameworks emphasized mechanisms of social domination, his later writings acknowledged the possibilities of individual agency.

In this chapter, I would like to consider the complicated relationship between Critical Theory (which is taken here in the restricted sense of the Frankfurt School tradition) and Political Philosophy. I will capitalise these two intellectual endeavours for the sake of clarity, so their names appear distinctly in the discussions that follow. The purpose of my chapter is to problematise the long-standing suspicions of classical and contemporary Political Philosophy by Critical Theorists, so that one may question the boundaries that are often erected within Critical Theory in relation to Political Philosophy, and thereby encourage Critical Theorists to engage more substantially with the latter. The chapter proceeds in five steps. In the first section, I briefly summarise the defining features of the research programme that the name of Critical Theory designates. Despite all the fluctuations in the understanding of it, and the immense variations in the theoretical tools mobilised to attempt to fulfil it, if we restrict the focus to the most eminent representatives of the tradition, a consistent project can be identified from the moment of its inception until today. I summarise the key features of the Critical Theory project to then highlight, in the second section, the different ways in which political dimensions are entailed in it. I distinguish a number of senses of “politics” in which Critical Theory takes an interest, as a direct result of its project. In the third section, I briefly recall the methodological, conceptual, and political reasons explaining why, throughout the generations, Critical Theorists have been suspicious of classical and contemporary Political Philosophy. To justify these claims and the call for greater cooperation between the traditions, I highlight, in the fourth section of this chapter, a number of areas in which work in Critical Theory has shown itself to be relatively underdetermined on political issues. In the final section, I provide some suggestions for how contemporary Critical Theory might address some of its deficits in the treatment of political questions, by engaging with authors situated outside the tradition.

In this chapter, Jean-Philippe Deranty and Emmanuel Renault offer a critical analysis of contemporary republicanism and its potential for democratizing work relations. Their complaint is that republicans have so far failed to address two pivotal aspects of work activity—namely, the experiences arising from the cooperative performance of work tasks and the socio-political significance of work collectives—and have thus provided an incomplete rationale for workplace democratization. Contra republicans, democratic work requires not only institutional and legal transformations, but also a vision of democracy defined, in Deweyan terms, as the cultivation of democratic habits or a ‘way of life’. Instead, then, of a republican conception of democratic voice as simply control of enterprises via representative deliberative procedures, this switch of emphasis to democracy as a way of life and to work experiences and collectives gives rise to a participatory model of workplace democracy calling for the democratization of productive activities in their entirety. The advantage of this model, Deranty and Renault contend, is that it is more attuned than republicanism to the myriad forms of dominating hierarchy inimical to worker freedom.

This essay underscores the relevance of Young Hegelianism, by analysing the reception of the Hegelian system by its contemporaries. Starting from the example of the concept of recognition, it seeks to explain why this concept, which is held today for one of Hegel’s foremost theoretical contributions, went unnoticed or was not deemed worthy of interest among authors who yet knew that system well. The article first surveys the meanings of the term Anerkennung in Hegel’s and the young Hegelians’ time with reference to Adelung’s and to the Grimm brothers’ dictionaries. In two further developments, it explores the uses of the term Anerkennung in Feurbach’s and Bruno Bauer’s works.

This chapter challenges the postwork critique of the work society and work ethic. The contention is that in responding to the problems posed by contemporary work we need to still insist on work's social centrality, not reject it. One error of the postwork stance is that, in its rejection of work's centrality, it targets an overly restricted notion and experience of work. A further problem is its failure to properly register the individual and social goods people can and do attain through work. This is compounded by a failure to realize that the movement towards a more free and just society in fact requires the endorsement of a work ethic, albeit one different from earlier forms and alive to the dangers of its being harnessed by regressive forces.

Growing economic inequality, workforce precarity, the perceived meaninglessness of many jobs, and the prospect of widespread technological unemployment have led to an unprecedented level of critical scrutiny of the institution of work. Some scholars go so far as to propose that we should take seriously, or even embrace, a “post-work” future. This volume aims to provide the first critical overview of the scholarly arguments about the design and desirability of such a “post-work” world. Topics addressed in its chapters include the historical origins of the work ethic; work’s relation to freedom, leisure, and self-realization; alternative visions of a post-work world; the intersection of post-work thinking with economic justice; and post-work’s relevance to environmental sustainability, care work, and democratic change.

Work is a major concern for most individuals, including scholars, and yet it is rarely mentioned, let alone studied, in research on mind and cognition. This article aims to demonstrate the relevance of work for cognitive research, by showing specifically how an enactive approach can illuminate the analysis of work. To help in this task, the article introduces “contemporary living labour theory” (CLLT), a rich strand of contemporary research based on Christophe Dejours’ psychodynamics of work. After outlining the two main paradigms, the article explores what an enactive approach informed by CLLT can teach about work across the different aspects of embodiment: metabolic, affective, sensorimotor and intersubjective. For each one of those aspects, an enactive approach lends descriptive richness and specificity to the analysis of work. However, CLLT also complements and extends the enactive approach at several important points. To “bring forth a world” is not just an epistemic or symbolic act, but also the outcome of work.

The essay is facing a legitimacy crisis. With students increasingly able to generate plausible submissions using Generative AI, the essay’s status as a valid instrument of assessment of student learning is under serious threat. Yet, rather than abandoning the essay or turning to superficial fixes, this paper argues that the current disruption offers a chance to reconsider what essays are for as well as the chance to consider what they could be. In this paper, we distinguish between the standardised academic essay of today from the historically contextualised essay. Drawing from the history of ideas, we argue that essays are best understood not as products to be measured against static criteria, but exploratory engagements with thought, shaped by uncertainty, divergence, and the recursive relationship between writer and text. This understanding has long been at odds with how essays are typically assessed and it is this misalignment, not AI alone, that we suggest underpins the current crisis. In response, we propose a set of structural changes to essay assessment design. We propose a holistic approach to assessment which, we suggest, helps show how the essay can be reconfigured as both an educationally meaningful and valid assessment task, fit for an age of AI without being defined by it.

This article seeks to re-evaluate the importance of the political in the thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The article first shows that Sartre’s description of Merleau-Ponty’s intellectual trajectory as one of increasing political apathy from the 1950s onwards is inaccurate. The article then demonstrates that throughout the post-war period, including in his project for a new ontology, Merleau-Ponty believed that a revised version of Marxism would provide the methodological framework within which philosophical work could address the political challenges of the present. This revised Marxism was to be a direct alternative to the reifying uses of Marx’s thinking. It would rely upon the latter’s self-reflexive historicism, which meant its very failures showed how philosophy might transform itself in connection with its own time. Cet article tente souligner la place du politique dans la pensée de Maurice Merleau-Ponty. On contestera d’abord la description faite par Sartre de sa trajectoire intellectuelle, selon laquelle il aurait fait preuve d’une apathie croissante, à partir des années cinquante, vis-à-vis des questions politiques. On montrera ensuite que durant toute la période d’après-guerre, jusque dans les recherches ontologiques ultimes, Merleau-Ponty a pensé qu’un usage renouvelé du marxisme permettrait au travail philosophique de répondre aux défis politiques du présent. Une telle révision du marxisme représentait une alternative directe aux usages réifiant de la pensée de Marx. Cette révision serait rendue possible par la réflexivité historiciste de cette pensée, qui fait que, dans ses erreurs mêmes, celle-ci révèle la capacité de la philosophie à se transformer au contact de son temps.

Although relatively unknown a decade ago, the work of Jacques Ranciere is fast becoming a central reference in the humanities and social sciences. His thinking brings a fresh, innovative approach to many fields, notably the study of work, education, politics, literature, film, art, as well as philosophy. This is the first, full-length introduction to Ranciere's work and covers the full range of his contribution to contemporary thought, presenting in clear, succinct chapters the key concepts Ranciere has developed in his writings over the last forty years. Students new to Ranciere will find this work accessible and comprehensive, an ideal introduction to this major thinker. For readers already familiar with Ranciere, the in-depth analysis of each key concept, written by leading scholars, should provide an ideal reference.

Generative AI (GenAI) grading and tutoring systems are rapidly entering higher education, promising increased efficiency and personalized learning experiences. We believe this technology should be viewed with caution, particularly in the case of philosophy. In this article, we first outline the nature and purported benefits of these systems. Next, we examine the economic motivations driving their adoption within institutions, such as reducing labor costs. Finally, we argue that these motivations, while compelling to administrators, may fail to consider potential negative consequences. We present six pedagogical reasons to be critical of the widespread implementation of GenAI in education: (1) limitations on teacher efficacy; (2) increased student alienation; (3) the undermining of educators’ duty of care; (4) the outsourcing of core teaching tasks; (5) questions regarding the accuracy and utility of GenAI graders; and (6) the risk of implementing GenAI as a misguided solution to real problems in education.

The modern work ethic is in crisis. The numerous harms and injustices harboured by current labour markets and work organisations, combined with the threat of mass unemployment entailed in rampant automation, have inspired a strong “post-work” movement in the theoretical humanities and social sciences, echoed by many intellectuals, journalists, artists and progressives. Against this widespread temptation to declare work obsolete, The Case for Work shows that our paltry situation is critical precisely because work matters. It is a mistake to advocate a society beyond work on the basis of its current organisation. In the first part of the book, the arguments feeding into the “case against work” are located in the long history of social and political thought. This comprehensive, genealogical inquiry highlights many conceptual and methodological issues that continue to plague contemporary accounts. The second part of the book makes the “case for work” in a positive way through a dialectical argument. The very feature of work that its critics emphasise, namely that it is a realm of necessity, is precisely what makes it the conduit for freedom and flourishing, provided each member of society is in a position to face this necessity in conditions that are equal and sustainable.

Rahel Jaeggi’s Critique of Forms of Life represents a welcome new development in critical social thought. It aims to overcome the ‘liberal abstinence’, which forbids criticizing the ethical fabric of social life, and proposes to connect normative evaluation with a serious social-ontological model of ‘forms of life’. In this article we argue, however, that Jaeggi’s ontological characterization of the concept of form of life is problematic in ways that introduce a number of adverse consequences for social critique. In section 1, we lay out the main components of Jaeggi’s account. In section 2, we present four interconnected problems that beset Jaeggi’s substantializing conception of forms of life. In section 3, we present an alternative construal of the idea of forms of life, one which does not utilize the concept for grasping substantial unities, but rather focuses on the ‘forms’ that specifically human life takes, and which grasps social practices as concrete collaborative activities involving expectations of recognition. We thereby bring together the recognition-theoretical strand of critical social thought with Jaeggi’s welcome new gambit. In section 4 we briefly put forth three mutually complementary ways to conceive of recognitive expectations immanent in social life understood as a collaborative endeavor.

Axel Honneth’s philosophical reflections always had significant historical dimensions, but it is only recently, in Recognition. A Chapter in the History of European Ideas, that he has attended to the history of recognition as a concept. This essay examines the cogency and the implications of this turn to intellectual history in the theory of recognition. The first section summarises the main historical claims put forward by Honneth. Section two raises critical doubts regarding three aspects of his narrative: the cultural contexts that are said to have influenced particular conceptions of recognition; the conceptions of recognition that are supposed to be tied to national cultures; and the method of linking particular meanings of recognition to national cultures. The third section broadens the scope and attempts to show why this turn to intellectual history, despite some shortcomings, raises tantalising questions for recognition theory, and beyond it, for critical theory.