This article traces a single, three-stage argument. It begins by documenting, with empirical precision, how digital platforms functioned as genuine instruments of horizontal mobilization during the North African uprisings of 2010–2012. It then analyses how those same platforms were rapidly incorporated into new and frequently more sophisticated architectures of social control, transforming what had been emancipatory tools into what Foucault would call dispositifs of docility. Finally, it asks what theoretical apparatus is adequate to comprehend this transition—and argues that the most productive framework is a deliberate synthesis of Foucault’s analytics of biopower and disciplinary normalization with Bauman’s diagnosis of liquid modernity. The contribution of Bauman is not merely decorative: his account of how solid disciplinary confinement mutates under liquid conditions into consensual, self-administered surveillance explains precisely why the digital panopticon is so much more difficult to resist than its institutional predecessors. The article also examines the epistemological dimensions of this subjection, attending to the structural marginalization of non-Western knowledge traditions through the normative alignment filters of Large Language Models. The argument is organized as a continuous analytical thread, not as a review of theoretical positions, and concludes with implications for decolonial critical theory.
This paper addresses the problem of sexual misrecognition: some groups are excluded from being seen as sexually desirable or are hypersexualised. This shapes their sexual subjectivity – how they understand themselves as sexual agents. Despite widespread initiatives calling for recognition in the domain of sexuality, the need for sexual recognition has remained undertheorised in recognition theory. Building on debates on the ambivalence of recognition, I argue that sexuality has a uniquely complex relationship to recognition. While sexual recognition is necessary for subjectivity, it also reinforces subjection to power structures. Moreover, sexuality continually transgresses sociality and subjectivity itself. Using Jeanette Chedda’s erotic story in Damn Horny as a case study, I demonstrate how sexual recognition transgresses ideals of mutuality and equality, and theorise transformative possibilities for cultivating sexual subjectivity differently.
Contemporary diagnoses of resurgent authoritarianism frequently attribute it to the political mobilization of fear, drawing on a long tradition that casts fear as the antithesis of freedom. This article argues that such a framework is conceptually inadequate in the face of climate breakdown. It critically engages scholarship that cautions against environmental fear and catastrophist discourse, identifying three key assumptions underpinning most of these critiques: that environmental fears are politically homologous to other historically theorized forms of fear; that fear directly fosters authoritarian tendencies at the individual level; and that fear consolidates reactionary power while weakening emancipatory movements at the collective level. Against this affective determinism and threat functionalism, the article draws on ecofeminist and anti-militarist thought to reconceptualize fear not as a regressive affect opposed to democratic agency, but as an ambivalent, critical orientation toward shared vulnerability. In this context, affective self-defense emerges as key: a mode of political praxis grounded in the open, collective acknowledgement and articulation of fear - rather than its suppression or instrumentalization - as a first step in the organization of resistance and care.
According to Adorno, all attempts to change society “immediately come up against the overwhelming force of inertia in the prevailing situation, and seem condemned to impotence.” This article explores the way the phenomenon of social and institutional inertia has been addressed in recent Critical Theory. It poses two central questions: firstly, what is social inertia, and what causes it? And secondly, how do we judge when institutions or social norms are “inert” or “obsolete”? It first briefly discusses the historical background of the problem of inertia, obsolescence and second nature in Hegel, Marx and the first generation of the Frankfurt School, and then discusses the central questions primarily with reference to recent work by Jaeggi and Menke and, to a lesser extent, Rosa and Von Redecker.
This paper engages with recent debates about the value and future of work by proposing a shift in perspective: instead of asking whether work is normatively good or bad, the focus is placed on how work operates. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of the dispositive, I conceptualise work as a historically specific and strategic arrangement of discourses, institutions, practices, and norms that binds individuals to the social world. Using Kathi Weeks’ theory of work’s antinomies, I show how contradiction is not incidental to work but central to its mode of operation. This framework makes it possible to reassess both contemporary attempts to recover the moral worth of work and post-work imaginaries that aim to abolish it. The paper argues that prominent normative accounts of work (e.g. Honneth, Gheaus and Herzog) overlook the mechanisms through which work is constituted as meaningful, while post-work theories, though politically generative, tend to underestimate the infrastructural and affective grip of the work dispositive. Reframing work as a dispositive thus offers a more critical and nuanced account of how it continues to shape subjectivity, social order, and ethical life—even in its imagined absence.
Drawing on Heller’s sustained dialogue with Kant and Marx, the paper argues for the continuing relevance of her social philosophy while also foregrounding unexpected affinities between these two classic figures in their respective conceptions of social and political community. I first examine Heller’s interpretation of the Marxian ethical-political legacy, paying particular attention to social experiments such as the Paris Commune and their significance for a radical Enlightenment project that rethinks the relationship between state and society. I then inspect Heller’s engagement with Kant and Marx on the historical continuity of republicanism, highlighting the rejection of instrumental domination and the demand for symmetric reciprocity among social agents. Finally, I analyze Heller’s theory of needs, particularly the concept of “radical needs,” and argue for its relevance to contemporary debates on democracy, social reproduction and non-paternalistic forms of political organization.
Social experiences of unfairness resist standard distributional accounts. This article argues that comparative relations do not merely shape responses to unequal outcomes but participate in constituting the sense of entitlement through which those outcomes are experienced as unfair. Drawing on René Girard’s social theory of mimetic desire, Leon Festinger’s social comparison theory, Axel Honneth’s account of recognition, and empirical research on inequity aversion from behavioural economics and comparative psychology, it develops a single mechanism—comparative entitlement formation—linking proximate comparison, the felt claim it generates, grievance, and, under determinate conditions, displacement onto vulnerable third parties. The argument is positioned between two literatures that approach the phenomenon from opposite directions and leave the same gap: egalitarian political philosophy has moved from the distribution of bundles toward the quality of social relations without supplying an account of how a comparative sense of entitlement is formed, while the recent literature on political grievance documents comparative resentment in detail without theorising the mechanism that generates it. Two consequences follow. First, the characteristic irrationality of unfairness experience—its disproportionate intensity under conditions of social proximity and similarity—reflects the mechanics of comparative entitlement formation rather than a failure of rational judgement. Second, the harms produced when such entitlements are frustrated are second-order costs of institutional arrangements: they are generated by distributive structures, borne by parties outside the initial justification, and cannot be externalised from the basic structure. The article specifies the conditions under which the mechanism operates, the evidential criteria for identifying its products, and the limits beyond which it does not extend.
In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals , Kant names beneficence, or promotion of another’s happiness, as the way we attain “positive” agreement with the humanity in another person (GMS 4:430). I argue, however, that beneficence is not the only way, or necessarily the preferred way, to secure this. By exploring the discussions of commerce and interaction found in Kant’s later practical philosophy, particularly the section on cosmopolitan right in the Metaphysics of Morals , I show that Kant makes available a substantively different way we can positively express recognition of others as ends in themselves. This alternative emphasizes not promoting another’s happiness but instead letting others influence both one’s own ends and other aspects of one’s identity.
Maurizio Ferraris’ “new realism” rejects postmodern constructionism and insists on the unamendable independence of reality. Yet his dismissal of interpretation-friendly ontological accounts as inherently anti-realist overlooks richer possibilities within the hermeneutic tradition. I argue that Luigi Pareyson’s hermeneutic ontology provides the missing ground for Ferraris’ strong realist insights. Through a triadic analysis in which I pair Ferraris’ concepts of unamendability , positivity , and documentality with Pareyson’s treatment of inexhaustibility , congeniality , and testimoniality , respectively, I demonstrate that to interpret is to participate in the active constitution and disclosure of the real. Pareyson’s theory of “ontological personalism” effectively shows that the resistance of reality derives from its relational excess, not abstract independence. Synthesizing their views yields a realist hermeneutics capable of affirming truth’s binding character while recognizing the situated and plural nature of all knowledge claims. Against naïve objectivism and subjective relativism alike, Pareyson carves a fruitful path for contemporary debates about the nature of reality, scientific objectivity, and the politics of truth.
The recent wave of human rights-based climate litigation has raised the question of whether states can be held responsible for the impact of their greenhouse gas emissions on human rights outside their territory. Given the lack of legal consensus, this paper examines this question in light of philosophical theories of human rights. I argue that if the “humanist” conception of human rights holds, then states must bear extraterritorial obligations in the context of climate change. Most opponents of these obligations rely on alternative “practical” conceptions. However, I defend that even if we follow the practice of human rights, as these conceptions insist, its internal norms require the allocation of extraterritorial climate obligations. Thus, I aim not only to give normative support to climate advocates, but also, to contribute to the development of a practice-based approach to the philosophy of human rights which goes beyond the borders of the state.
Big data and empirical social science share an often-subterraneous assumption, namely, positivism. Some of their jointly hidden premises are that experiences, preferences, and culture are all equally quantifiable, testable, and measurable. Further, their view is a reification of the status quo, a harmonistic view of society. On the other hand, the critical view espouses social antagonism , the view that society essentially consists of a struggle between groups. Critical theory argues against the critical rationalists that positivism (and thus, empirical social science) is guilty of a political agnosticism and, therefore, services the ends of bureaucracy and administration. This paper draws out some latent beliefs of big data as a new version of positivism and shows that big data inherits the problems of empirical social science. In particular, algorithms and data analytics for predictive policing, aggressively personalized advertisement, and prison recidivism stand out as substantial evidence of the new positivism that surges in administered society.
This article examines the semantic structure of the left-right political binary in contemporary Anglophone discourse. It argues that the fusion of “right” as directional orientation with “right” as moral correctness produces a form of semantic over-determination that complicates the articulation of democratic legitimacy in periods of political crisis. The claim is not that directional metaphors determine political outcomes, but that they furnish a discursive resource that can be mobilized in struggles over authority, order, and rectitude. To illuminate the contingency of this fusion, the article turns to the East Asian concept of zheng 正 (uprightness), whose semantic independence from handedness reveals that the association between direction and correctness is historically specific rather than conceptually necessary. Rather than proposing zheng as a replacement for the left-right political vocabulary, the article develops it as a diagnostic lens through which to distinguish questions of moral correctness, political legitimacy, and political orientation that English tends to conflate. By placing the Confucian doctrine of zhengming (Rectification of Names) into dialogue with contemporary democratic discourse, the article argues that the comparative value of zheng lies less in offering an alternative political language than in exposing the contingency of our own. It concludes that comparative political philosophy can contribute to democratic self-understanding not by replacing existing vocabularies but by making their underlying conceptual architecture newly visible.
Afro-pessimism poses one of the most profound challenges to contemporary political theory. By conceptualizing Blackness as social death, it argues that anti-Blackness is not a contingent injustice but the ontological ground of modernity. If Blackness names structural non-being, then universality-the category of the Human-appears intrinsically anti-Black. This article engages Afro-pessimism as a serious theoretical interlocutor in order to test the claim that antagonism grounds a negative universality. It argues, first, that Afro-pessimism correctly identifies anti-Blackness as the paradigmatic modern inscription of universality's constitutive antagonism. However, it contends that Afro-pessimism risks converting structural centrality into ontological exception by positing Blackness as metaphysical singularity. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Ranci & egrave;re's account of the "part of no-part," & Zcaron;i & zcaron;ek's theory of antagonistic universality, McGowan's account of shared limitation, and Kapoor and Zalloua's theory of immanent antagonism, the article proposes that antagonism is universal but its social embodiment is racially stratified. Lack is structural; yet its symbolic management and libidinal displacement are historically organized through anti-Blackness and racial capitalism. Anti-Blackness thus reveals the traumatic kernel of universality without exhausting its logic. Such a negative conception of universality preserves the singularity of anti-Black violence while reopening the possibility of solidarity grounded not in analogy or identity but in shared structural division.
In both 1990’s Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome and 2004’s Cities of Words , Stanley Cavell presents his contribution to democratic thought as an addendum to John Rawls’s Theory of Justice . In this essay I consider the implications of this for Cavell’s understanding of democracy, focusing on his discussion of “the wager of democracy” in the later text. When one attends to the details of that discussion, as I do at some length, it becomes clear that this is not truly a wager of democracy , but rather one of liberal justice . I argue that our times require a genuine wager of democracy, one geared towards a collective future that emphasizes solidarity and collective agency over equality, consent, and individualism. Ironically, Cavell’s own work outside these chapters makes important contributions to our understanding of what this would entail. I conclude that Cavell’s corpus is less consistent and coherent than previously thought, and that, if we are to bring out his true importance to democratic culture, we need to read him to a certain extent against himself and much more critically of his liberal individualism than scholars have thus far done.
Algorithmic governance is sometimes compared to Hobbes’s Leviathan. Here I argue that, while algorithmic governance shares some similarities with the Hobbesian schema, it goes further in its suppression of contestation. To show this, I read Hobbes against Rancière’s reduction of him to a theorist of consensus to make two basic points. First, it is important for Hobbes that laws be public and rationally comprehensible. By contrast, algorithmic governance is notoriously opaque. Second, Hobbes also retains a sense of equity as an appeal against universally applied legal decisions, allowing decisions to be tailored to individual cases. Algorithmic governance does not typically involve equity-based appeal, a point that is especially clear in the context of bureaucratic governance structures, where algorithmic systems generate results that cannot be either understood or appealed. The result in Rancière’s terms is that classificatory, algorithmic systems are even more powerful agents of depoliticization than Leviathan.
This article introduces the concept of postsecular antisemitism to name a condition in which prevailing frameworks struggle to register antisemitic harm that operates through the entanglement of religious and secular grammars. It argues that the assumption of normative separability between religious and secular domains, inherited from the secularization thesis and only partially challenged by the postsecular turn, continues to pre-structure what becomes legible within social theory. To develop this argument, the article stages a comparison between early and late Critical Theory. Whereas Horkheimer and Adorno refused to separate religious and secular elements into discrete explanatory domains, Habermas's influential postsecular approach assumes their normative separability even as the secularization prediction is abandoned. Drawing on recent cases of digital antisemitism, which make religious-secular entanglement visible, the article shows the limits of Habermas's procedural model and extends it through a constellational reconstruction of Adorno's approach. The analysis demonstrates how antisemitic harm can be displaced from critical scrutiny through its assignment across the religious-secular divide, clarifying how classificatory distinctions organize a gap between harm and the frameworks meant to register it. In doing so, it opens onto a broader reorientation of social theory beyond inherited assumptions of religious-secular separability.
This essay aims to reconstruct a liberal international political theory of New Confucianism by integrating Charles Taylor’s ontology-based and Andrew Linklater’s civility-based approaches to intercultural dialogue and transcultural values. It aligns the New Confucian vision of a “world of great harmony,” rooted in Wang Yangming’s idea of “all-under-Heaven as one family,” with modern cosmopolitan discourse to develop a philosophical sketch of Confucian cosmopolitanism. The study addresses four central issues in the construction of a universal moral community and its relationship with the political community: (1) the moral basis of human rights, (2) the institutional recognition of human rights, (3) the convergence of norms of civility, and (4) the moral grounding for promoting global civility. Through this framework, it advances a normative Confucian vision of weak cosmopolitanism that promotes a shared global moral consensus on human rights and civility while respecting state sovereignty and cultural diversity. It also aims to engage with cultural relativism in China.
This paper demonstrates the potential of democratic civility as a means of safeguarding democracy in times of populism and polarization. I construe democratic civility as a normative framework for interactions among citizens in civil society, anchored in a commitment to relating to one's fellow citizens as respected adversaries. Conceptualizing democratic civility in this way advances the scholarly literature in three ways. First, by anchoring norms of civility in disagreement, democratic civility allows us to appreciate the transformative potential of populism and polarization while retaining sufficient normative resources to restrain their challenge to democracy. Second, democratic civility highlights shortcomings in recent critical and radical contributions to debates on civility and strikes a balance between skeptics and proponents of civility. Finally, democratic civility reveals how scholarship on democratic defense and depolarization has neglected the merits of civil society and provides a normative blueprint for evaluating new avenues for safeguarding democracy.
Frantz Fanon's writings remain controversial for the force and openness with which they advocate violence in the context of decolonial political struggle. Prima facie, Fanon appears to suggest that decolonial political violence is somehow inherently good; this places him in tension with a certain common-sense thought about the ethics of political violence, which is that it is only OK to commit acts of violence when they cannot be avoided. In this paper however, I argue that this tension with the 'common-sense view' is only seeming. I show this by establishing that what Fanon is really interested in is the ability of the native to exercise what Jonathan Gingerich has recently dubbed 'spontaneous freedom'. Via work by Hannah Arendt, which Gingerich also cites, I argue that this shouldn't surprise us, since spontaneous freedom is necessary for the establishing and maintenance of political communities. In colonial societies, as Fanon argues, violence is the only means the native has for expressing their free, spontaneous agency. This is why it cannot be avoided.
In an article published in 1965, Carl Schmitt discusses political theology in the context of Protestant legal theories and calls for more political theological reflection on Calvinist thought. In this paper, I intend to answer Schmitt's call and adopt his political theological method as a 'sociology of juristic concepts', and apply it to the concept of 'sphere sovereignty' that was developed by Dutch Neo-Calvinist thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In contrast to the decisionist concept of sovereignty that Schmitt derived from Catholic authors, the Neo-Calvinist concept of sphere sovereignty is intended to limit the power of the sovereign and secure the independence of other institutions, primarily that of the church. A political theology of sphere sovereignty simultaneously contributes to Max Weber's study of Calvinist economic influence on modernity. On this basis, some preliminary conclusions are provided about the relationship between Calvinism and secular modernity.
