Tunnustus, demokratia ja populismi

Groups as Persons? A Suggestion for a Hegelian Turn

AbstractChristian List and Philip Pettit have recently argued for a performative theory of personhood in which all agents who manage to perform in the space of obligations are taken as persons. Based on this account they claim that group agents are also persons. This theory has been challenged on the grounds of its historical accuracy, lack of political relevance, and contestability of the concept of personhood. This paper aims to take a new perspective on the debate by approaching it through the Hegelian idea of recognition. The claim is that recognition theory provides a multi-dimensional view of personhood that gives a clearer account of what is at stake with collective personhood.

Workplace democracy and republican freedom

In this chapter, Keith Breen and Onni Hirvonen examine the case for democratic worker voice based on the republican ideal of freedom as non-domination. While not unconvincing, this case is primarily consequentialist in character and therefore open to significant empirical disagreement. Indeed, together with republican arguments for democratic worker voice, there are republican arguments for worker voice that reject workplace democracy, republican arguments that see state regulation plus a universal basic income (UBI) as sufficient for minimizing workplace domination, and republican arguments that focus exclusively on exit rights and are hostile to augmenting workers’ voice. Breen and Hirvon…

Pathologies of Collective Recognition

Tunnustussuhteet ja ryhmäpersoonat : tutkimus ryhmistä toimijoina tunnustussuhteissa

Tutkimus käsittelee ryhmiä toimijoina tunnustussuhteissa. Kysymys on laaja ja se jakautuu pienempiin osakysymyksiin. Aluksi teen selkoa siitä, mitä tunnustussuhteilla tarkoitetaan. Kannattamani näkemyksen mukaan tunnustus on vastavuoroinen suhde, jossa toista ihmistä pidetään persoonana. Seuraamani Axel Honnethin (1995) mukaan tunnustus voidaan jakaa kolmeen eri lajiin, joiden pohjalta kehittyvät kutakin lajia ja tunnustuksen muotoa vastaavat käytännölliset itsesuhteet. Toiseksi keskityn siihen, millaisia vaatimuksia tunnustussuhteet asettavat toimijoille. Tunnustus on intersubjektiivista toimintaa, ja kantani mukaan se vaatii toimijoiltaan kykyä sekä suoraan radikaaliin intersubjektiivisuu…

Who Is Ill When a Society Is Ill?

This chapter gives an overview of four different approaches to social pathologies, which are present in contemporary critical social theory, and analyses their social-ontological commitments. The different approaches can be divided into two camps. The ‘thin sense’ of social pathology focuses on social wrongs, and the socially caused and pervasive suffering of individuals. The ‘thick sense’ of social pathology, in turn, claims that society is its own entity, or a whole, which can be ill. This chapter discloses the ontological commitments behind different conceptions of social pathology in order to highlight what difference these commitments make in relation to the critical potential of socia…

Populism as a pathological form of politics of recognition

This article combines the neo-Hegelian theory of recognition with an analysis of social pathologies to show how the populist formulations of political goals in struggles for recognition are – despite their potential positive motivating force – socially pathological. The concept of recognition, combined with the idea of social pathologies, can thus be used to introduce normative considerations into the populism analysis. In this article it is argued that, although populism is useful in the sense that it aims to ameliorate real experienced lack of recognition through fostering political movements, it is also harmful. The simplified populist representations of collective identities are often g…

Hegelin pallia heiluttamassa

Kirja-arvio: Risto Saarinen, Recognition and Religion: A Historical and Systematic Study. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016. 268 sivua. Kirjallisuus tunnustuksen filosofiasta ja politiikasta on viime vuosikymmeninä kasvanut hyllymetreittäin. Suurin osa kirjoituksista edustaa kriittistä yhteiskuntateoriaa ja useimmat esitetyt näkemykset pohjautuvat Hegeliltä perittyyn tunnustuksen käsitykseen, jonka mukaan vastavuoroiset positiiviset asenteet persoonien välillä rakentavat persoonia sekä heidän itsesuhteitaan. Positiivinen tunnustus muilta nähdään sekä inhimillisenä tarpeena että välttämättömänä ehtona persoonuudelle. Sen puute puolestaan saa yksilöt ja ryhmät kamppailemaan tunnustuksesta…

Book Review : Instituting thought: Three paradigms of political ontology

Who Is Ill When a Society Is Ill?

This chapter gives an overview of four different approaches to social pathologies, which are present in contemporary critical social theory, and analyses their social-ontological commitments. The different approaches can be divided into two camps. The ‘thin sense’ of social pathology focuses on social wrongs, and the socially caused and pervasive suffering of individuals. The ‘thick sense’ of social pathology, in turn, claims that society is its own entity, or a whole, which can be ill. This chapter discloses the ontological commitments behind different conceptions of social pathology in order to highlight what difference these commitments make in relation to the critical potential of socia…

Groups as Persons? : A Suggestion for a Hegelian Turn

Christian List and Philip Pettit have recently argued for a performative theory of personhood in which all agents who manage to perform in the space of obligations are taken as persons. Based on this account they claim that group agents are also persons. This theory has been challenged on the grounds of its historical accuracy, lack of political relevance, and contestability of the concept of personhood. This paper aims to take a new perspective on the debate by approaching it through the Hegelian idea of recognition. The claim is that recognition theory provides a multi-dimensional view of personhood that gives a clearer account of what is at stake with collective personhood. peerReviewed

Recognition and Civic Selection

Large-scale immigration and the refugee crisis have caused many states to adapt ever stricter civic selection processes. This paper discusses the challenges arising from civic selection from the perspective of recognition theories. The argument is that recognition theories provide good conceptual tools with which to critically analyze civic selection and immigration. However, the paper also aims to highlight that many current institutional practices are problematic from the perspective of recognition. In the context of civic selection, it is helpful to understand recognition as something that comes in two analytically distinct modes: horizontal (or interpersonal) and vertical (or institutio…

The Problem of the First Belief: Group Agents and Responsibility

Abstract Attributing moral responsibility to an agent requires that the agent is a capable member of a moral community. Capable members of a moral community are often thought of as moral reasoners (or moral persons) and, thus, to attribute moral responsibility to collective agents would require showing that they are capable of moral reasoning. It is argued here that those theories that understand collective reasoning and collective moral agency in terms of collective decision-making and commitment – as is arguably the case with Christian List and Philip Pettit’s theory of group agency – face the so-called “problem of the first belief” that threatens to make moral reasoning impossible for gr…

Recognition and democracy – An introduction

This is an introduction to a special issue on recognition and democracy. We outline the constitutive and enabling relations between democracy and recognition. We distinguish between pre-political and political forms of identity and recognition, between horizontal and vertical forms of recognition, and between democratic and other ways or arranging the vertical and horizontal aspects of political life. We also distinguish between the roles of a subject and a co-author of law. The intruduction also includes an overview of the individual articles in this special issue. The issue tries to fill some theoretical gaps in theories of democracy and recognition, with a special emphasis on feminist p…

Recognitive Arguments for Workplace Democracy

In this paper we have a twofold aim. First, we wish to show that commitments within recognition theory lend themselves readily for arguments for workplace democratization. This is done through arguing that authoritarian forms of labour organization go against fundamental recognitive needs, generating injustice and unnecessary social suffering that could be ameliorated through giving workers a proper voice. In conjunction with this aim, we offer a defence of the idea of workplace democracy from the perspective of recognition. Our goal is not to override other arguments for workplace democracy, but rather to provide additional reasons to democratize working life.

Democratic institutions and recognition of individual identities

This paper draws from two central intuitions that characterize modern western societies. The first is the normative claim that our identities should be recognized in an authentic way. The second intuition is that our common matters are best organized through democratic decision-making and democratic institutions. It is argued here that while deliberative democracy is a promising candidate for just organization of recognition relationships, it cannot fulfil its promise if recognition is understood either as recognition of ‘authentic’ collective identities or as recognition of too atomistic or individualized subjects. If deliberative democracy is to be understood as successfully providing au…

On the ontology of social pathologies

The recent years have seen a rehabilitation of the concept of social pathology in the critical social theory. However, several pertinent questions about how to understand social pathologies remain. One of the big issues is, who is actually ill when a society is ill? Is it certain individuals, a large proportion of the population, groups, institutions, or the society as a whole? And what does it mean for these entities to be in a pathological state?This short presentation introduces four conceptions of social pathology that can be divided into roughly two camps. The “thin sense” of social pathology is more metaphorical and focuses on the socially caused and pervasive suffering of individuals…

Group Personhood in the Contemporary Social Ontology

Recognition, Identity, and Difference

This entry discusses three forms of politics of recognition: politics of universalism, affirmative identity politics, and deconstructive politics of difference. It examines the constitutive, causally formative, and normative role that recognition has for the relevant senses of universal standing, particular identity, and difference in these approaches. peerReviewed

Grounding social criticism : from understanding to suffering and back

This paper critically examines John Dewey’s and Axel Honneth’s critical social philosophies in order to highlight two different normative sources of social struggle: scientific understanding and social suffering. The paper discusses the relations of these sources with each other and aims to show to what extent the normative sources of Dewey’s and Honneth’s critical social theories are compatible. A further aim is to use the comparison between Dewey and Honneth in order to argue for a desiderata for critical social ontology. The argument is that we want to consistently include both elements – suffering and understanding – in critical social theory as only by having both will critical theory …

Yliopiston suuntaa etsimässä

Vuoden 2010 alussa toteutettu Suomen yliopistokenttää ravistellut yliopistouudistus aiheutti aikanaan kiivasta keskustelua. Yhtäältä uudistusta puolustettiin vetoamalla yliopistojen autonomian lisääntymiseen ja kilpailukyvyn parantumiseen, toisaalta uudistus nähtiin yliopistodemokratian horjuttamisena ja keskitetyn ylhäältä alaspäin suuntautuvan top-down-hallinnon lisääntymisenä. Professori Thomas Wilhelmsson toimi uudistuksen aikana Helsingin yliopiston rehtorina ja hänen muistelmansa sekä arvionsa koskien yliopistouudistusta on julkaistu Gaudeamukselta. Kirja tarjoaa sisäpiirin perspektiivin yliopistouudistukseen ja tekee kiinnostavan syväluotauksen yhden keskeisimmän yliopistouudistuksen…

11. Pathologies of Collective Recognition

This paper maps the theoretical possibilities of what pathologies of collective recognition might be. It argues that collectives have a twofold role in recognition: they can function either as normative frameworks that enable recognition, or as agents of recognition. From this it follows that pathologies of collective recognition can be either systemic or agential. Furthermore, accepting the agential role of collectives opens possibilities for specific forms of pathologies. The paper concludes with remarks on the ontological commitments that need to be made if one wants to understand pathologies of recognition as including collective agents.

Insults, humour and freedom of speech

In this article we argue that freedom of speech should be understood as a social freedom. In the public discussion after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, it has often been understood as an absolute right to say anything – to offend, to make a fool of others and of oneself, and to express any opinion regardless of the consequences. We challenge this view and propose that advocating freedom of speech without understanding its social foundations is misleading and counterproductive. Based on the critical social theories of Erich Fromm, Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth, we show that there is an alternative tradition in which freedom is fundamentally rooted in social relations and therefore requires re…

Demokraattisen kokeilullisuuden puolesta, kapitalismia vastaan

Kirja-arvostelu teoksesta Axel Honneth, Sosialismin idea (Die Idee des Sozialismus, 2015). Suom. Arto Kuusterä & Jussi Palmusaari. Gaudeamus, Helsinki 2018. 224 s. nonPeerReviewed

Johdanto : Tunnustuksen filosofia ja politiikka