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9Henri-Claude de BettigniesIn Henri Claude de Bettignies & Mike J. Thompson (eds.), Leadership, spirituality and the common good: East and West approaches, Garant. pp. 4--129. 2010.
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83. Operationalising the Common Good in Business through Leadership and SpiritualityIn Henri Claude de Bettignies & Mike J. Thompson (eds.), Leadership, spirituality and the common good: East and West approaches, Garant. pp. 4--43. 2010.
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Capitalism as Deficient ModernityIn Andrew Buchwalter (ed.), Hegel and Capitalism, State University of New York Press. pp. 117-132. 2015.
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9Descent of the dialectic: phronetic criticism in an age of nihilismRoutledge. 2024.This book reconstructs the concept and practice of dialectics as a means of grounding a critical theory of society. At the center of this project is the thesis of phronetic criticism or a form of reason that is able to synthesize human value with objective rationality. This book argues that defects in modern forms of social reason are the result of the powers of social structure and the norms and purposes they embody. Increasingly, modern societies are driven not by substantive values concerning…Read more
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8Marketing virtueBusiness Ethics, the Environment and Responsibility 11 (4). 2002.This paper is designed to respond to the conference theme of making business ethical specifically within a marketing context. Ethical marketing challenges marketers to move away from illusory and deceptive brand promises to make way for a form of marketing which serves the consumer with creative and truthful messages. The paper markets virtue to marketers whilst exploring existing marketing deontologies and the problem of the depersonalised relationship between marketer and consumer. ‘Marketing …Read more
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3Marketing virtueBusiness Ethics, the Environment and Responsibility 11 (4): 354-362. 2002.This paper is designed to respond to the conference theme of making business ethical specifically within a marketing context. Ethical marketing challenges marketers to move away from illusory and deceptive brand promises to make way for a form of marketing which serves the consumer with creative and truthful messages. The paper markets virtue to marketers whilst exploring existing marketing deontologies and the problem of the depersonalised relationship between marketer and consumer. ‘Marketing …Read more
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27Leadership, spirituality and the common good: East and West approaches (edited book)Garant. 2010.Preface Leadership, Spirituality and the Common Good East and West Approaches Henri-Claude de Bettignies & Mike J. Thompson For many, to bring together “ leadership”, “spirituality” and “the Common Good” will be seen more as a ...
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10Radical intellectuals and the subversion of progressive politics: the betrayal of politics (edited book)Palgrave-Macmillan. 2015.Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics is a challenge to contemporary radical politics and political thought. This collection of essays critiques the dominant trends and figures on the left that have distorted the legacy of progressive politics, arguing that they have moved politics away from issues of class and economic power toward a preoccupation with culture and identity. The contributors discuss this new radicalism from the perspective of a more rational form of le…Read more
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18Twilight of the Self: The Decline of the Individual in Late CapitalismStanford University Press. 2022.In this new work, political theorist Michael J. Thompson argues that modern societies are witnessing a decline in one of the core building blocks of modernity: the autonomous self. Far from being an illusion of the Enlightenment, Thompson contends that the individual is a defining feature of the project to build a modern democratic culture and polity. One of the central reasons for its demise in recent decades has been the emergence of what he calls the cybernetic society, a cohesive totalizatio…Read more
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13Adorno's Reception of Weber and LukácsIn Peter Eli Gordon (ed.), A companion to Adorno, Wiley. 2019.Adorno was deeply influenced by ideas about the rationalization of mass society and effects of commodification on consciousness. The work of Max Weber and Georg Lukács were dual influences that shaped much of Adorno's own work. He develops his critique of the “totally administered society” as a confluence of Weber's rationalization thesis as well as Lukács' theory of reification of consciousness due to the penetration of the commodity form into everyday life. But Adorno moves beyond these ideas …Read more
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12The German Aesthetic Tradition (review)Philosophy and Literature 28 (1): 218-220. 2004.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 28.1 (2004) 218-220 [Access article in PDF] The German Aesthetic Tradition, by Kai Hammermeister; xv & 259 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, $22 paper. In some ways, aesthetic theory has become a thing of the past. With the exception of a kind of fascination with works such as T. W. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, aesthetics, as a project or tradition, has surrendered its once monolithic and grandi…Read more
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25Review: Philip Pettit. The Robust Demands of the Good: Ethics with Attachment, Virtue, and Respect. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 281 pages; $45.00/hardcover (review)Philosophical Forum 47 (1): 117-121. 2016.
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105Enlarging the Sphere of Recognition: A Hegelian Approach to Animal Rights (review)Journal of Value Inquiry 45 (3): 319-335. 2011.
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21Toward a critical social ontologyPhilosophical Forum 54 (1-2): 61-78. 2023.I argue in this paper for a critical social ontology, or an approach to theorizing social reality and social institutions that is more than descriptive of social reality, but is also able to provide practical reasoning with an ontological dimension for judgment. At the heart of this idea is a different take on social metaphysics from most standard current accounts in that it begins with empirical, phylogenetic capacities of human beings for social practices (realizing abstract thought in the wor…Read more
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Inventing the "political" : Arendt, anti-politics and the deliberative turn in contemporary political theoryIn Gregory R. Smulewicz-Zucker & Michael Thompson (eds.), Radical intellectuals and the subversion of progressive politics: the betrayal of politics, Palgrave-macmillan. 2015.
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Critical agency in Hegelian ethics : social metaphysics versus moral constructivismIn James Gledhill & Sebastian Stein (eds.), Hegel and Contemporary Practical Philosophy: Beyond Kantian Constructivism, Routledge. 2020.
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504Reification as an Ontological ConceptMetodo. forthcoming.In this paper, I outline the ways that reification as a pathology of what I call “cybernetic society” shapes the fundamental structures of the self and our shared social reality. Whereas the classical theory of reification was a diagnostic attempt to understand the failure of class consciousness, I believe we must push this thesis further to show how is fundamentally an ontological and not a merely cognitive or epistemic concern. By this I mean that it is a pathology of consciousness as well as …Read more
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17Constructing Marxist Ethics: Critique, Normativity, Praxis (edited book)Brill. 2015.Constructing Marxist Ethics offers a series of compelling essays that reassess the role of ethics and moral values in Marxist theory and philosophy.
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109The two faces of domination in republican political theoryEuropean Journal of Political Theory 17 (1): 1474885115580352. 2018.I propose a theory of domination derived from republican political theory that is in contrast to the neo-republican theory of domination as arbitrary interference and domination as dependence. I suggest that, drawing on of the writings of Machiavelli and Rousseau, we can see two faces of domination that come together to inform social relations. One type of domination is extractive dominance where agents are able to derive surplus benefit from another individual, group, or collective resource, na…Read more
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128Reconstructing republican freedomPhilosophy and Social Criticism 39 (3): 277-298. 2013.This article presents a critique of Philip Pettit’s concept of ‘freedom as non-domination’ and provides an alternative theory of both domination and republican political freedom. I argue that Pettit’s neo-republican concept of domination is insufficient to confront modern forms of domination and that this hampers his concept of republican freedom and its political relevance under the conditions of modernity. Whereas the neo-republican account of domination is defined by ‘arbitrary interference’,…Read more
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23On the Ethical Dimensions of WasteArchiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie 101 (2): 252-269. 2015.I propose and outline an ethical theory of waste not as refuse or garbage, but rather as a property of activities and practices. On my account, waste results when resources are utilized in society in such a way that the maximum number of individuals within the community are unable to benefit from the collective resources and efforts of social activities. I point to three ethical “dimensions” of waste: socially unproductive activity, under-utilization of resources, and the mis-utilization or mis-…Read more
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52Hegel’s Dialectical Political Economy (review)The Owl of Minerva 33 (1): 134-137. 2001.The renaissance in the study of Hegel’s political and social philosophy has focused in recent years on moral thought, ethics, law, political institutions, categories of social freedom and other themes which Hegel laid out primarily in the Philosophy of Right. Curiously missing from many of these studies is the relation of political economy—or economics more generally— to the larger body of Hegel’s political theory and philosophy. Added to this is the ostensible decline of Marxism which has also …Read more
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30Islam, Rights, and Ethical Life: The Problem of Political Modernity in the Islamic WorldTheoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 57 (123): 99-125. 2010.This paper considers the roots of the dissonance between political modernity and Islamic societies. It argues that primacy has to be given to the analysis of different paradigms of 'ethical life' which are ways in which ethical-political categories are organized within society. A distinction is made between 'nomocentric' and 'rights-based' paradigms of ethical life, the former associated with a system of moral duties and the latter with a system of political and ethical rights accorded to the in…Read more
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36Critical theory in critical times: Transforming the global political and economic orderContemporary Political Theory 18 (4): 284-289. 2017.
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20Beyond the vote: the crisis of American liberalismLogos. Anales Del Seminario de Metafísica [Universidad Complutense de Madrid, España] 3 (4). 2004.
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113Axel Honneth and the neo-Idealist turn in critical theoryPhilosophy and Social Criticism 40 (8): 779-797. 2014.I provide a critique of Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition by calling into question the extent to which recognitive relations are immune to the effects of social and economic power and their ability to shape consciousness and moral cognition. I maintain that as a theory of socialization, Honneth’s theory is inadequate to deal with the strong structural-functional forces that hold administrative-capitalist societies together. This has the effect of constituting subjectivity in particular ways, …Read more
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28The German Aesthetic Tradition (review)Philosophy and Literature 27 (2): 478-480. 2003.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 478-480 [Access article in PDF] The German Aesthetic Tradition,by Kai Hammermeister; xv & 259 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; $60.00 cloth; $22.00 paper. In some ways, aesthetic theory has become a thing of the past. With the exception of a kind of fascination with works such as T. W. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, as a project, as a tradition, aesthetics has surrendered its once mon…Read more
Areas of Specialization
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Social Philosophy |
Political Theory |
Justice |
Equality |
History of Political Philosophy |
Critical Theory |
Social Ontology |
Psychoanalysis, Misc |