Introduction to a book I have yet to write.
We live in times of extreme poverty and inequality. Various forms of violence, insecurity and instability seem to be intensifying. Societies around the world are struggling to come to terms with increased flows of people. And anthropogenic climate change is threatening the very conditions for life on earth.Facing these challenges requires concerted political action as well as specialist technical knowledge and expertise. But the fact that these problems go to the root of the human condition, touching on the political, economic, social, emotional, and psychological preconditions for a good life, highlights the vital role that the humanities, including philosophy, have to play in the task at hand. Indeed, thinkers from the critical tradition broadly conceived have generally viewed their enterprise as contributing to the betterment of the human condition. The core contention of this project is that political philosophy in the broadly Marxist tradition offers a rich and varied array of conceptual tools with which to help to change the world for the better. Bringing together insights and arguments from analytic Marxism, critical theory and continental philosophy, and focusing in particular on global poverty, climate change, and borders, Changing the World with Philosophyshows what is wrong with global capitalism, what possibilities exist in the present to transform it, and how to motivate people to do so.
Whatever the original intent of Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach – “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, to change it” – Marxist thought has always been resolutely internationalist. Indeed, it was Marx’s appreciation of the shared suffering of workers around the world that led he and Engels to call upon them to unite. Without reducing all of humanity’s problems to the workings of capitalism or implying the primacy of class-based oppression over other forms, capital as a social relation has a globalizing tendency that leaves vanishingly few of the earth’s inhabitants outside of its circuits. A theoretical approach that foregrounds capitalism is thus well disposed to address global challenges, especially poverty and migration. Moreover, avoiding the liberal conceit of clearly demarcated political and economic realms and instead, in various ways, theorizing their co-constitution, Marxist thinkers have enlarged the range of obstacles to human flourishing that fall within their critical gaze beyond those that originate from the state, while also drawing attention to the limitations of formal freedoms and equality. Finally, the materialist approach of Marxism, which means understanding how humans create and reproduce the material conditions of their lives, has lent itself to analyses of the relationship between the social and the natural, and indeed, to critiques of the very distinction between the two.
Of course, Marxist philosophy cannot claim a monopoly on internationalism, attention to non-political sources of domination, or ecological sensibility. In fact, Marxist philosophy includes thinkers and positions that are Eurocentric, insensitive to race and gender-based oppression, dismissive toward politics and liberal democracy, and environmentally destructive. And yet the Marxist archive, broadly construed and supplemented with insights from complementary approaches, also contains resources with which philosophy can live up to the goal of changing the world. Before I can explain exactly which concepts and insights I select from these particular currents of thought, it is first necessary to say what I mean by Marxist philosophy. I do not restrict this category to thinkers who explicitly or extensively write aboutMarx and his work. Exegesis, commentary and biography do not establish intellectual or political affinity with any subject. Nor does Marxist philosophy include all anti-capitalist thinkers: critiques of capitalism can be conservative and it is reductive to describe Marx and Marxists as simply “anti-capitalist.” Instead, I take inspiration from Gilles Deleuze’s explanation of the sense in which he and his co-author Félix Guattari “remained Marxists,” namely by placing an analysis of capitalism as an evolving social system at the center of political philosophy.[1]To this I add Marx’s own concern with showing how that social system both enables and constrains human flourishing. Within this broad intellectual terrain of Marxist philosophy it is then possible to carve out a range of distinct positions and approaches. For the purposes of this project, I use the terms “analytic” and “continental” philosophy, as well as critical theory.
Let me say from the outset that I use these terms, especially the first two, without meaning in any way to reify a “divide” that arguably fails to capture much of intellectual substance. However, it remains the case that, at least in matters of both style and professional milieu, these terms do indeed retain some value and that few thinkers associated with one “camp” engage seriously with the other. This is not to suggest that no analytic Marxists ever read continental philosophers, or vice versa. Indeed, the leading thinker of the analytic Marxist tradition, G.A. Cohen, credits Louis Althusser’s Pour Marxwith convincing him of the importance of Marx’s Capitalto the broader Marxian oeuvre. However, Cohen’s description of Althusser’s subsequent Lire Le Capitalneatly conveys a typical attitude of analytic philosophy toward its continental cousin: Cohen finds that Althusser uses the French language “elegantly” and “evasively” and that much of the text is “critically vague.”[2]With respect to “critical theory,” the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy appears to be less relevant, perhaps in part because of its more explicit commitment to interdisciplinarity. Thinkers within this approach often engage with and use arguments from both analytic and continental philosophy. Yet despite in many cases sharing the analytic philosopher’s penchant for crisp prose, critical theorists generally look askance at the ideal theorizing and utopian postulations that can be found in both analytic and continental philosophy.
So how, then, can these different approaches and traditions complement one another? One of the indubitable strengths of analytic political philosophy, from Rawls to Nozick to Cohen, is its deep commitment to conceptual clarity. Moreover, the central concern of much work in this tradition with normative argumentation and the specification of ideals enables persuasive claims about what precisely is wrong or unjust about a particular situation or configuration of power, and what a more consistent and satisfactory application of fundamental values would entail. In keeping with this, one goal of analytic Marxism as I understand it is to specify the normative basis of Marx’s critique of capitalism. Admittedly, this idea will bemuse some scholars of Marx since it is questionable whether his critique of capitalism was intended to be “normative.” However, since this project does not intend to offer an interpretation of Marx but instead proposes to use ideas more loosely connected with his own to help change the world, this criticism does not apply. Exemplary in this domain is work by the philosopher Pablo Gilabert, who for example deploys a modified Kantian conception of human dignity to justify the Marxian criticisms of exploitation, domination and alienation, as well as to give greater specificity to the content of socialism.[3]
From the perspective of many critical theorists, however, ideal or normative theory succumbs to a lack of historical and political sense, meaning that its prescriptions are untethered or “free-standing” with respect to contemporary conditions and concrete struggles against oppression. In particular, critical theorists repeat the Marxist condemnation of such theory as “utopian,” preferring Marx’s formulation of critique as the “self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age” and spelling out structural contradictions and sources of emancipation that lie dormant in the contemporary social formation.[4]Yet this does not prevent critical theory from being placed in a mutually enriching dialogue with normative arguments, as indeed appears in the recent dialogue between Fraser and Jaeggi.[5]Finally, when supplemented with insights from post- and de-colonial thought, “global critical theory” elucidates the ongoing effects of imperialism in both material and discursive dimensions, and can thus help alleviate the risk of false universalism that besets analytic philosophy.[6]
Finally, although the lines of distinction between critical theory and continental philosophy are generally less clearly drawn, the latter can often display a similar utopianism to analytic philosophy. For example, Paul Patton has described both Deleuze and Rawls as practitioners of “utopian political philosophy,” albeit the former more “radical” and the latter more “realistic.”[7]While continental philosophy is often rightly rebuked for a lack of attention to and specificity about its own normative basis, its ability to enhance our sensitivity to often insoluble paradoxes and to provide new conceptual lens through which to understand the world, often aided by flamboyant and exuberant prose, is unsurpassed by the more sober style and modest goals of both analytic philosophy and critical theory. Precisely its utopianism is thus an asset, because it can provoke us to think the world and existence differently, indeed to put into play a new world through thought. This in turn, I suggest, can provide a potent moral-psychological motivation to ‘do the right thing’ as established in more rationalistic terms by analytic thought.[8]From continental philosophy I draw in particular from two thinkers – Jean-Luc Nancy and Gilles Deleuze. Notwithstanding the differences between the two, each offers a social ontology that avoids both individualism and communitarianism and focuses instead on relationality and the common. Despite being politically engaged writers, however, Nancy and Deleuze’s texts typically lack the type of normative argumentation found in analytic philosophy and stand to benefit from concepts from more analytically oriented philosophy. Moreover, their writings often operate at a level of generality and abstraction that is insufficiently attentive to the contemporary conjuncture, both in terms of the experiences of suffering and latent possibilities for social change.
Today more than ever, philosophers need to think at the level of the world if they would rightly lay claim to critical thought’s goal of enlarging human emancipation. Yet even interpreting ‘the world’, let alone changing it for the better, raises significant epistemological, ethical and political questions. Despite the tensions between them, critical theory’s capacity for empirically rich analysis, analytic Marxism’s contribution to normative theorizing, and continental philosophy’s utopian imaginativeness need to be brought together. Changing the World with Philosophy does just that, moving between conceptual and empirical analysis of the current global predicament, focusing in particular on global poverty, climate change and migration and borders. It shows how these problems flow from global capitalism, what is unjust about the latter, and how philosophy can help us overcome it.
[1]Gilles Deleuze in Conversation with Antonio Negri, http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze3.htmaccessed August 8, 2019.
[2]G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), x.
[3]Pablo Gilabert, “Kantian Dignity and Marxian Socialism,” Kantian Review 22, no.4: 553-557.
[4]Nancy Fraser in particular has consistently invoked this formulation of critique. For a recent example, see Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2018).
[5]Ibid.
[6]Ina Kerner, “Postcolonial Theories as Global Critical Theories,” Constellations25, no. 4 (2018): 614-628.
[7]Paul Patton, “Utopian Political Philosophy: Deleuze and Rawls,” Deleuze and Guattari Studies 1, no. 1 (2007): 41-59.
[8]I develop this argument with respect to motivating cosmopolitanism in “Motivating Cosmopolitanism: Jürgen Habermas, Jean-Luc Nancy, and the case for Cosmocommonism.” Contemporary Political Theory(2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-019-00337-9
We live in times of extreme poverty and inequality. Various forms of violence, insecurity and instability seem to be intensifying. Societies around the world are struggling to come to terms with increased flows of people. And anthropogenic climate change is threatening the very conditions for life on earth.Facing these challenges requires concerted political action as well as specialist technical knowledge and expertise. But the fact that these problems go to the root of the human condition, touching on the political, economic, social, emotional, and psychological preconditions for a good life, highlights the vital role that the humanities, including philosophy, have to play in the task at hand. Indeed, thinkers from the critical tradition broadly conceived have generally viewed their enterprise as contributing to the betterment of the human condition. The core contention of this project is that political philosophy in the broadly Marxist tradition offers a rich and varied array of conceptual tools with which to help to change the world for the better. Bringing together insights and arguments from analytic Marxism, critical theory and continental philosophy, and focusing in particular on global poverty, climate change, and borders, Changing the World with Philosophyshows what is wrong with global capitalism, what possibilities exist in the present to transform it, and how to motivate people to do so.
Whatever the original intent of Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach – “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, to change it” – Marxist thought has always been resolutely internationalist. Indeed, it was Marx’s appreciation of the shared suffering of workers around the world that led he and Engels to call upon them to unite. Without reducing all of humanity’s problems to the workings of capitalism or implying the primacy of class-based oppression over other forms, capital as a social relation has a globalizing tendency that leaves vanishingly few of the earth’s inhabitants outside of its circuits. A theoretical approach that foregrounds capitalism is thus well disposed to address global challenges, especially poverty and migration. Moreover, avoiding the liberal conceit of clearly demarcated political and economic realms and instead, in various ways, theorizing their co-constitution, Marxist thinkers have enlarged the range of obstacles to human flourishing that fall within their critical gaze beyond those that originate from the state, while also drawing attention to the limitations of formal freedoms and equality. Finally, the materialist approach of Marxism, which means understanding how humans create and reproduce the material conditions of their lives, has lent itself to analyses of the relationship between the social and the natural, and indeed, to critiques of the very distinction between the two.
Of course, Marxist philosophy cannot claim a monopoly on internationalism, attention to non-political sources of domination, or ecological sensibility. In fact, Marxist philosophy includes thinkers and positions that are Eurocentric, insensitive to race and gender-based oppression, dismissive toward politics and liberal democracy, and environmentally destructive. And yet the Marxist archive, broadly construed and supplemented with insights from complementary approaches, also contains resources with which philosophy can live up to the goal of changing the world. Before I can explain exactly which concepts and insights I select from these particular currents of thought, it is first necessary to say what I mean by Marxist philosophy. I do not restrict this category to thinkers who explicitly or extensively write aboutMarx and his work. Exegesis, commentary and biography do not establish intellectual or political affinity with any subject. Nor does Marxist philosophy include all anti-capitalist thinkers: critiques of capitalism can be conservative and it is reductive to describe Marx and Marxists as simply “anti-capitalist.” Instead, I take inspiration from Gilles Deleuze’s explanation of the sense in which he and his co-author Félix Guattari “remained Marxists,” namely by placing an analysis of capitalism as an evolving social system at the center of political philosophy.[1]To this I add Marx’s own concern with showing how that social system both enables and constrains human flourishing. Within this broad intellectual terrain of Marxist philosophy it is then possible to carve out a range of distinct positions and approaches. For the purposes of this project, I use the terms “analytic” and “continental” philosophy, as well as critical theory.
Let me say from the outset that I use these terms, especially the first two, without meaning in any way to reify a “divide” that arguably fails to capture much of intellectual substance. However, it remains the case that, at least in matters of both style and professional milieu, these terms do indeed retain some value and that few thinkers associated with one “camp” engage seriously with the other. This is not to suggest that no analytic Marxists ever read continental philosophers, or vice versa. Indeed, the leading thinker of the analytic Marxist tradition, G.A. Cohen, credits Louis Althusser’s Pour Marxwith convincing him of the importance of Marx’s Capitalto the broader Marxian oeuvre. However, Cohen’s description of Althusser’s subsequent Lire Le Capitalneatly conveys a typical attitude of analytic philosophy toward its continental cousin: Cohen finds that Althusser uses the French language “elegantly” and “evasively” and that much of the text is “critically vague.”[2]With respect to “critical theory,” the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy appears to be less relevant, perhaps in part because of its more explicit commitment to interdisciplinarity. Thinkers within this approach often engage with and use arguments from both analytic and continental philosophy. Yet despite in many cases sharing the analytic philosopher’s penchant for crisp prose, critical theorists generally look askance at the ideal theorizing and utopian postulations that can be found in both analytic and continental philosophy.
So how, then, can these different approaches and traditions complement one another? One of the indubitable strengths of analytic political philosophy, from Rawls to Nozick to Cohen, is its deep commitment to conceptual clarity. Moreover, the central concern of much work in this tradition with normative argumentation and the specification of ideals enables persuasive claims about what precisely is wrong or unjust about a particular situation or configuration of power, and what a more consistent and satisfactory application of fundamental values would entail. In keeping with this, one goal of analytic Marxism as I understand it is to specify the normative basis of Marx’s critique of capitalism. Admittedly, this idea will bemuse some scholars of Marx since it is questionable whether his critique of capitalism was intended to be “normative.” However, since this project does not intend to offer an interpretation of Marx but instead proposes to use ideas more loosely connected with his own to help change the world, this criticism does not apply. Exemplary in this domain is work by the philosopher Pablo Gilabert, who for example deploys a modified Kantian conception of human dignity to justify the Marxian criticisms of exploitation, domination and alienation, as well as to give greater specificity to the content of socialism.[3]
From the perspective of many critical theorists, however, ideal or normative theory succumbs to a lack of historical and political sense, meaning that its prescriptions are untethered or “free-standing” with respect to contemporary conditions and concrete struggles against oppression. In particular, critical theorists repeat the Marxist condemnation of such theory as “utopian,” preferring Marx’s formulation of critique as the “self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age” and spelling out structural contradictions and sources of emancipation that lie dormant in the contemporary social formation.[4]Yet this does not prevent critical theory from being placed in a mutually enriching dialogue with normative arguments, as indeed appears in the recent dialogue between Fraser and Jaeggi.[5]Finally, when supplemented with insights from post- and de-colonial thought, “global critical theory” elucidates the ongoing effects of imperialism in both material and discursive dimensions, and can thus help alleviate the risk of false universalism that besets analytic philosophy.[6]
Finally, although the lines of distinction between critical theory and continental philosophy are generally less clearly drawn, the latter can often display a similar utopianism to analytic philosophy. For example, Paul Patton has described both Deleuze and Rawls as practitioners of “utopian political philosophy,” albeit the former more “radical” and the latter more “realistic.”[7]While continental philosophy is often rightly rebuked for a lack of attention to and specificity about its own normative basis, its ability to enhance our sensitivity to often insoluble paradoxes and to provide new conceptual lens through which to understand the world, often aided by flamboyant and exuberant prose, is unsurpassed by the more sober style and modest goals of both analytic philosophy and critical theory. Precisely its utopianism is thus an asset, because it can provoke us to think the world and existence differently, indeed to put into play a new world through thought. This in turn, I suggest, can provide a potent moral-psychological motivation to ‘do the right thing’ as established in more rationalistic terms by analytic thought.[8]From continental philosophy I draw in particular from two thinkers – Jean-Luc Nancy and Gilles Deleuze. Notwithstanding the differences between the two, each offers a social ontology that avoids both individualism and communitarianism and focuses instead on relationality and the common. Despite being politically engaged writers, however, Nancy and Deleuze’s texts typically lack the type of normative argumentation found in analytic philosophy and stand to benefit from concepts from more analytically oriented philosophy. Moreover, their writings often operate at a level of generality and abstraction that is insufficiently attentive to the contemporary conjuncture, both in terms of the experiences of suffering and latent possibilities for social change.
Today more than ever, philosophers need to think at the level of the world if they would rightly lay claim to critical thought’s goal of enlarging human emancipation. Yet even interpreting ‘the world’, let alone changing it for the better, raises significant epistemological, ethical and political questions. Despite the tensions between them, critical theory’s capacity for empirically rich analysis, analytic Marxism’s contribution to normative theorizing, and continental philosophy’s utopian imaginativeness need to be brought together. Changing the World with Philosophy does just that, moving between conceptual and empirical analysis of the current global predicament, focusing in particular on global poverty, climate change and migration and borders. It shows how these problems flow from global capitalism, what is unjust about the latter, and how philosophy can help us overcome it.
[1]Gilles Deleuze in Conversation with Antonio Negri, http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze3.htmaccessed August 8, 2019.
[2]G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), x.
[3]Pablo Gilabert, “Kantian Dignity and Marxian Socialism,” Kantian Review 22, no.4: 553-557.
[4]Nancy Fraser in particular has consistently invoked this formulation of critique. For a recent example, see Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2018).
[5]Ibid.
[6]Ina Kerner, “Postcolonial Theories as Global Critical Theories,” Constellations25, no. 4 (2018): 614-628.
[7]Paul Patton, “Utopian Political Philosophy: Deleuze and Rawls,” Deleuze and Guattari Studies 1, no. 1 (2007): 41-59.
[8]I develop this argument with respect to motivating cosmopolitanism in “Motivating Cosmopolitanism: Jürgen Habermas, Jean-Luc Nancy, and the case for Cosmocommonism.” Contemporary Political Theory(2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-019-00337-9