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5508World Crisis and Underdevelopment: A Critical Theory of Poverty, Agency, and CoercionCambridge University Press. 2017.World Crisis and Underdevelopment examines the impact of poverty and other global crises in generating forms of structural coercion that cause agential and societal underdevelopment. It draws from discourse ethics and recognition theory in criticizing injustices and pathologies associated with underdevelopment. Its scope is comprehensive, encompassing discussions about development science, philosophical anthropology, global migration, global capitalism and economic markets, human rights, interna…Read more
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207The Copernican Revolution revisited: paradigm, metaphor and incommensurability in the history of science- Blumenberg's response to Kuhn and DavidsonHistory of the Human Sciences 6 (4): 11-35. 1993.
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153The Limits of Critical Democratic Theory Regarding Structural Transformations in Twenty-First Century Left PoliticsIn Critical Theory and the Political, Manchester University. forthcoming.This chapter proposes a critical examination of ideological tendencies at work in two main democratic theories currently at play within the critical theory tradition: the deliberative theory advanced famously by Habermas and his acolytes, and the partisan theory advanced by Mouffe and others influenced by Gramsci and Schmitt. Explaining why these theories appeal to distinctive social groups on the Left, divided mainly by education and economic status, it argues that neither theory accounts for t…Read more
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123Contractualism, democracy, and social law: Basic antinomies in liberal thoughtPhilosophy and Social Criticism 17 (4): 265-296. 1991.
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100Critical theory and philosophyParagon House. 1990.Critical Theory and Philosophy illuminates one of the most complex and influential philosophical movements of this century. After tracking Critical Theory to its source in the works of Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Weber, David Ingram examines the four major figures of the Frankfurt School: Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas. The logical structure of this text guides both novice and veteran students through specific social and political concerns toward a gradual unders…Read more
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94Of sweatshops and subsistence: Habermas on human rightsEthics and Global Politics 2 (3). 2009.In this paper I argue that the discourse theoretic account of human rights defended by Jürgen Habermas contains a fruitful tension that is obscured by its dominant tendency to identify rights with legal claims. This weakness in Habermas’s account becomes manifest when we examine how sweatshops diminish the secure enjoyment of subsistence, which Habermas himself (in recognition of the UDHR) recognizes as a human right. Discourse theories of human rights are unique in tying the legitimacy of human…Read more
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92Review essay: Under consideration: Alessandro Ferrara's The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment, Columbia University Press, 2008, 235 pp (review)Philosophy and Social Criticism 36 (8): 981-984. 2010.(No abstract is available for this citation)
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82Dworkin, Habermas, and the cls movement on moral criticism in lawPhilosophy and Social Criticism 16 (4): 237-268. 1990.CLS advocates renew Marx's critique of liberalism by impugning the rationality of formal rights. Habermas and Dworkin argue against this view, while showing how liberal polity might permit reasonable conflicts between competing principles of right. Their models of legitimate legislation and adjudication, however, presuppose criteria of rationality whose appeal to truth ignores the manner in which law is--and sometimes ought to be--compromised. Hence a weaker version of the CLS critique may be ap…Read more
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80Rights and privileges: Marx and the jewish questionStudies in East European Thought 35 (2): 125-145. 1988.
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77Jürgen Habermas and Hans‐Georg GadamerIn Robert C. Solomon & David Sherman (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy, Blackwell. 2003.This chapter contains sections titled: Biographical Background to the Gadamer/Habermas Debate Gadamer Habermas Conclusion.
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68Review of Herbert Marcuse, Douglas Kellner ed., Towards a Critical Theory of Society: The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse: Volume Two (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2002 (1). 2002.
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63The retreat of the political in the modern age: Jean-Luc Nancy on totalitarianism and communityResearch in Phenomenology 18 (1): 93-124. 1988.
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62Recognition Within the Limits of Reason: Remarks on Pippin's Hegel's Practical PhilosophyInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 53 (5): 470-489. 2010.In Hegel's Practical Philosophy (2008), Robert Pippin argues that Hegel's mature concept of recognition is properly understood as an ontological category referring exclusively to what it means to be a free, rational individual, or agent. 1 I agree with Pippin that recognition for Hegel functions in this capacity. However, I shall argue that conceiving it this way also requires that we conceive it as a political category. Furthermore, while Hegel insists that recognition must be concrete?mediated…Read more
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57Between Political Liberalism and Postnational CosmopolitanismPolitical Theory 31 (3): 359-391. 2003.It is well known that Rawls and Habermas propose different strategies for justifying and classifying human rights. The author argues that neither approach satisfies what he regards as threshold conditions of determinacy, rank ordering, and completeness that any enforceable system of human rights must possess. A related concern is that neither develops an adequate account of group rights, which the author argues fulfills subsidiary conditions for realizing human rights under specific conditions. …Read more
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57Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self by Linda AlcoffConstellations 18 (1): 106-109. 2011.
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56Foucault and HabermasIn Gary Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Cambridge University Press. 1994.The article is a comprehensive comparison of Foucault and Habermas which focuses on their distinctive styles of critical theory. The article maintains that Foucault's virtue ethical understanding of aesthetic self-realization as a form of resistance to normalizing practices provides counterpoint to Habermas's more juridical approach to institutional justice and the critique of ideology. The article contains an extensive discussion of their respective treatments of speech action, both strategic a…Read more
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46The Political (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2002._The Political_ is a collection of readings by the most important political philosophers representing the six major schools of Continental philosophy: Phenomenology, Existentialism, Critical Theory, Poststructuralism, Postmodernism, and Postcolonialism
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41In today’s America the persistence of crushing poverty in the midst of staggering affluence no longer incites the righteous jeremiads it once did. Resigned acceptance of this paradox is fueled by a sense that poverty lies beyond the moral and technical scope of government remediation. The failure of experts to reach agreement on the causes of poverty merely exacerbates our despair. Are the causes internal to the poor – reflecting their more or less voluntary choices? Or do they emanate from stru…Read more
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39Habermas and the Unfinished Project of DemocracyHuman Studies 28 (2): 223-225. 2005.This collection of ten essays offers the first systematic assessment of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Jurgen Habermas's masterful defense of the rational potential of the modern age. An opening essay by Maurizio Passerin d'Entreves orients the debate between Habermas and the postmodernists by identifying two different senses of responsibility. Habermas's own essay discusses the themes of his book in the context of a critical engagement with neoconservative cultural and political tren…Read more
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39The Postmodern Kantianism of Arendt and LyotardReview of Metaphysics 42 (1). 1988.THE PAST DECADE has witnessed an extraordinary resurgence of interest in Kant's writings on aesthetics, politics, and history. On the Continent much of this interest has centered on the debate between modernism and postmodernism. Both sides of the debate are in agreement that Kant's differentiation of cognitive, practical, and aesthetic domains of rationality anticipated the fragmentation of modern society into competing if not, as Weber assumed, opposed lifestyles, activities, and value spheres…Read more
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39Review of David Ingram: Reason, History, and Politics: The Communitarian Grounds of Legitimation in the Modern Age (review)Ethics 107 (2): 366-368. 1997.
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39Reconciling positivism and realism: Kelsen and Habermas on democracy and human rightsPhilosophy and Social Criticism 40 (3): 237-267. 2014.It is well known that Hans Kelsen and Jürgen Habermas invoke realist arguments drawn from social science in defending an international, democratic human rights regime against Carl Schmitt’s attack on the rule of law. However, despite embracing the realist spirit of Kelsen’s legal positivism, Habermas criticizes Kelsen for neglecting to connect the rule of law with a concept of procedural justice (Part I). I argue, to the contrary (Part II), that Kelsen does connect these terms, albeit in a manne…Read more
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38Critical Theory and PovertyIn Routledge Handbook of Poverty, . forthcoming.This chapter explores the contributions that the Frankfurt School of critical theory has made to philosophical discussions about the meaning and injustice of poverty. Critical theorists interpret poverty to mean more than material deprivation, and they see its injustice as 2 extending beyond wrongful suffering and the threat to a human right to life to encompass psychological impoverishment and dehumanization. The chapter begins by examining critical theory’s historical roots in the Marxist crit…Read more
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34Review essay : James L. Marsh, critique, action, and liberation (albany, ny: Suny press, 1995Philosophy and Social Criticism 23 (5): 115-122. 1997.
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34I propose to criticize two strands of argument - contractarian and utilitarian – that liberals have put forth in defense of economic coercion, based on the notion of justifiable paternalism. To illustrate my argument, I appeal to the example of forced labor migration, driven by the exigencies of market forces. In particular, I argue that the forced migration of a special subset of unemployed workers lacking other means of subsistence cannot be redeemed paternalistically as freedom or welfare enh…Read more
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33The Limits and Possibilities of Communicative Ethics for Democratic TheoryPolitical Theory 21 (2): 294-321. 1993.
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33Law: key concepts in philosophyContinuum. 2006.Clear, concise and comprehensive, this is the ideal introduction to the philosophy of law for those studying it for the first time.
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Loyola University, ChicagoProfessor
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Chicago, Illinois, United States of America
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