"Fritz W. Scharpf wird 90 Jahre alt" (Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung 12-02-2025)
Jürgen Kaube - "Verflechtung als Falle" (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 12-02-2025)
Uli Kreikebaum - "Dieser Kölner ist unbekannter Star der Wissenschaft" (Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 12-02-2025)
An interview with Fritz Scharpf: "Die SPD ist womöglich ein Auslaufmodell" (Frankfurter Rundschau 13-02-2025)
(Routledge, 2025)
268 pages
Description
Providing a comprehensive critical genealogy of liberal socialism from a sympathetic but critical standpoint, Matthew McManus traces its core to the Revolutionary period that catalyzed major divisions in liberal political theory to the French Revolution that saw the emergence of writers like Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine who argued that liberal principles could only be inadequately instantiated in a society with high levels of material and social inequality to John Stuart Mill, the first major thinker who declared himself a liberal and a socialist and who made major contributions to both traditions through his efforts to synthesize and conciliate them. McManus argues for liberal socialism as a political theory which could truly secure equality and liberty for all.
Contents [Preview]
Introduction: Retrieving Liberal Socialism
1. What is Liberal Socialism?
Part I: The Origins of Liberal Socialism
2. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity
3. Thomas Paine’s Denaturalization of Inequality
4. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Egalitarian Rights of Man and Woman
Part II: The Maturation of Liberal Socialism
5. John Stuart Mill-The First Liberal Socialist
6. Karl Marx’s Critique of Liberalism
7. Ethical Socialism and Social Democratic Reformism
8. C.B Macpherson’s Critique of “Possessive Individualism”
9. John Rawls’ Just Society
10. On Racial and Black Radical Liberalism
Part III: The Future of Liberal Socialism
11. Chantal Mouffe, Norberto Bobbio, and Axel Honneth-Agonistic Liberal Socialism and the Dialectics of Recognition
12. A Future For Liberal Socialism?
Matthew McManus is a lecturer in Political Science at the University of Michigan.
(Oxford University Press, 2024)
304 pages
Description
"Justice and Reciprocity" examines the place of reciprocity in egalitarianism, focusing on John Rawls’s conception of ‘justice as fairness’. Reciprocity was central to justice as fairness, but Rawls wasn’t fully explicit about the concept or its diverse roles. The book’s main thesis is threefold. First, reciprocity is not simply a fact of human psychology or a duty to return benefits, but a limiting condition on general duties. Second, such conditions are a natural consequence of thinking of equality as a relational value. However, third, we can identify limits on this conditionality, which explain how some duties of justice can be unconditional. The book explores the ramifications of this argument in a series of debates about distributive justice in which Rawls’s theory has played an organizing role: the justice of productive incentives, duties to future generations, unconditional basic income, and global justice. In each domain, thinking about reciprocity as a limiting condition rather than simply a duty helps explain otherwise puzzling aspects of justice as fairness, in some cases making the view more plausible, but in others underlining limits of the view that will be unappealing to egalitarians of a more unilateral bent. The overall aim of the book is to show that reciprocity involves more than returning benefits, and that limiting justice with reciprocity conditions need not make justice implausibly undemanding. In this way, I hope to rehabilitate reciprocity for egalitarianism.
Contents
1. Reciprocity and Egalitarianism [Preview]
2. Reciprocity as Motivation
3. Reciprocity as Duty
4. Reciprocity as Limiting Condition
5. Role Reversal and the Difference Principle
6. Cooperation, Competition, and Incentives
7. Future Generations
8. Unconditional Basic Income
9. Global Justice
10. Conclusion
Andrew Lister is Associate Professor, Department of Political Studies at Queen's University. See his blog here.
A doctoral dissertation by James Rosenberg, Harvard University:
"Essays on John Rawls and Social Theory" (2024)
Dissertation advisor: Michael Rosen.
Abstract:
"How does Rawlsian political philosophy relate to social theory? Rawls thought that principles of justice must be developed in light of social theory. I argue that his own social theory, that of society as a fair system of cooperation, is responsible for some of the limitations of the Rawlsian framework. The dissertation uses Rawls’s insight about the relationship between political philosophy and social theory to internally criticize Rawlsian political philosophy with respect to its capacity to diagnose and offer adequate prescriptions against the injustices it criticizes. Each of the chapters attempt to elaborate on Rawls’s own methodological thesis that political philosophy must be in dialogue with social theory."
I am honored to be ranked number 2 on this list:
50 Best Political Philosophy Blogs and Websites in 2025
Peter Dews on Dieter Henrich (1927-2022)
"Commemorating Dieter Henrich: Subjectivity and Metaphysics" [Open access]
(Hegel Bulletin)
An interview with Claus Offe recorded in 2008:
"Demontage des Sozialen im 21. Jahrhundert" (30 minutes)
Interviewer: Stefan Fuchs.
In "The Nation", Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins talks with Peter E. Gordon (Harvard) about his book "A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity", and the future of critical theory:
What Adorno Can Still Teach Us
Excerpt:
"Adorno is too often seen as a thoroughgoing pessimist who devoted his criticism only to the task of exposing what is “negative” or irrational in modern society. The widespread caricature of Adorno as a scowling contrarian or snob continues to inhibit our understanding of his work. This caricature, I believe, does a grave injustice to the complexity of his thought. My general argument is that Adorno was far more conflicted - or, to use the more technical term, dialectical - than the standard interpretation allows. As a critical theorist, he devoted his work to exposing the negative, but with an anticipatory orientation toward the largely unrealized possibility of human flourishing.
His writing, though often dark and even ruthless in its criticism of present irrationality, is nonetheless shot through with glimpses of what happiness would be. These anticipations are admittedly uncertain, since in a damaged world we see as if through a glass darkly. But the concept of an unrealized good is already implicit in the critique of what is bad."
(State University of New York Press, 2024)
266 pages
Description
Humans are animals who fictionalize other animals to asse their "humanness." We are philosophical animals who philosophize about our humanity by projecting images onto a mirror about other animals. Spanning literature, philosophy, and ethics, the thread uniting The Philosophical Animal is the bestiary and how it continues to inform our imaginings. Beginning with an exploration of animals and women in the literary work of Coetzee, famous for his book on The Lives of Animals, Eduardo Mendieta then dives into the genre of bestiaries in order to investigate the relation between humanity and animality. From there he approaches the works of Derrida and Habermas from the standpoint of genetic engineering and animal studies. While we have intensely modified many species genetically, we have not done this to ourselves. Why? Finally, Mendieta deals with the political and ethical implications suggested by this question before ending on an autobiographical note about growing up around so-called animals, and in particular horses.
Contents [Open access]
Introduction: The Poetic Species
I. Ceasing to Be Animal
1: Zoopoetics: Coetzee’s Animals and Philosophy
2: Political Bestiary: On the Uses of Violence
3: Heidegger’s Bestiary: The Speechless and Unhistorical Animal
II. Not Yet Human
4: Habermas on Human Cloning: The Debate on the Future of the Species
5: Communicative Freedom and Genetic Engineering
6: We Have Never Been Human, or How We Lost Our Humanity
III. Toward a Companion Species Ethics
7: Animal Is to Kantianism As Jew Is to Fascism: Adorno’s Bestiary
8: Interspecies Cosmopolitanism
9: Bestiaries of Extinction: Anthropodicy or Anthropohippology
Jürgen Habermas made numerous corrections and revisions in the second edition of his Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (2019/2022).
On HabermasForum, I have uploaded a list of the corrections and revisions I have identified:
Addendum to Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie.
On December 16, Axel Honneth held the Jan Patočka Memorial Lecture 2024 in Vienna:
The Standpoint of Moral Progress. A Defence in Kantian Spirit (video)
0:07: Lecture
1:02: Q&As
Abstract: "Today, the idea that there has been moral progress in human history is highly controversial and contested. Many intellectuals from various camps consider it impossible, if not immoral, to claim that there has been anything in the historical past that can be called an improvement in moral attitudes and the application of moral principles. The reasons for this strong rejection of the idea of moral progress are either empirical or normative: either it is claimed that the historical facts strongly contradict such progress, or that there is no sufficiently impartial perspective from which to judge such progress. This lecture aimed to show that both objections can be refuted if one has a proper understanding of the perspective from which to claim a past process of moral progress; this perspective must not only be constantly self-critical, but must also construct the history to be told about the moral past very differently from all previous such narratives."
by Marjan Ivković & Zona Zarić
(Edinburgh University Press, 2024)
248 pages
Description
"Nancy Fraser and Politics" is a systematic reconstruction of the work of Nancy Fraser, a key contemporary figure of critical theory and socialist feminism. It argues that Fraser's critical theory is a powerful and sophisticated analytical prism for diagnosing the breadth of empirical variety and depth of structural causality of injustice and domination in the ‘actually existing’ capitalist democracies of today, and for informing and inspiring numerous political movements struggling for societal emancipation.
Ivković and Zarić demonstrate that a key aspect of Fraser’s critical theory - her structural approach to domination which traces the manifold empirical injustices to a common root cause - is a thread that runs through her entire opus.
Contents [preview]
Introduction: Nancy Fraser as a Critical Theorist [pdf]
1. The Theoretical and Political Coordinates of Fraser’s Perspective
2. Fraser’s Theory of Capitalism
3. The Complexity of Liberation: Fraser’s Feminism
4. The Normative Weight of Politics: Fraser’s Theory of the Public Sphere
5. Fraser on Emancipation as a Political Process and Institutional Form
Conclusion
