Keith Pisani

Recent scholarship on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and social ontology suggests that the two fields can engage in a mutually enriching dialogue. In particular, it has been argued that because critical theory necessarily makes social-ontological assumptions, it can draw on resources from social ontology to articulate these assumptions more explicitly. While I am sympathetic to this intellectual cross-pollination, I argue that although critical theory necessarily relies on social-ontological assumptions, it is theoretically obligated to engage in social ontology only when failing to do so hinders the attainment of its stated aims. In this article, I distinguish between internally relevant and externally relevant social-ontological theorisation. The former is warranted by the critical-theoretical account itself, whereas the latter, while potentially yielding valuable insights, is not essential to it. This distinction is illustrated and developed through an analysis of Jürgen Habermas’s colonisation thesis and its ancillary theses on rationalisation and integration. The analysis of Habermas’s ideas also serves to construct a criteria framework for determining when critical theory is theoretically obligated to engage in social-ontological theorisation.

Paul Benson and Andrea C. Westlund have proposed conceptualising personal autonomy in terms of the readiness to respond to criticism that targets the agent’s actions and intentions (Benson) or commitments (Westlund). While incorporating this dialogical facet into a theory of personal autonomy is a step in the right direction, a theory of personal autonomy that is exclusively construed in terms of this facet and that posits discursive accountability as the sole criterion against which actions, choices, and commitments can be judged as autonomous or not is too restrictive and entails counterintuitive ideas. In this article, an alternative conceptualisation is proposed, one that avoids reductively construing personal autonomy exclusively in terms of the discursive and communicative facet and that conceptualises this facet in terms of communicative spaces which agents can claim authority over and in which and through which they can take ownership of claims, actions, and commitments. This alternative conceptualisation is initially formulated – by way of analogy – in terms of the normative requirement to respect the physical space of individuals. The article also outlines a set of conditions which indicate when one should claim authority over communicative spaces and the manner in which one takes ownership of claims, actions, and commitments in order to be autonomous.