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2017 | Book

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Feminism, Capitalism, and Critique

Essays in Honor of Nancy Fraser

Editors: Banu Bargu, Prof. Chiara Bottici

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

This edited collection examines the relationship between three central terms—capitalism, feminism, and critique—while critically celebrating the work and life of a thinker who has done the most to address this nexus: Nancy Fraser. In honor of her seventieth birthday, and in the spirit of her work in the tradition of critical theory, this collection brings together scholars from different disciplines and theoretical approaches to address this conjunction and evaluate Fraser’s lifelong contributions to theorizing it. Scholars from philosophy, political science, sociology, gender studies, race theory and economics come together to think through the vicissitudes of capitalism and feminism while also responding to different elements of Nancy Fraser’s work, which weaves together a strong feminist standpoint with a vibrant and complex critique of capitalism. Going beyond conventional disciplinary distinctions and narrow debates, all the contributors to this project share a commitment to critically understanding the connection between capitalism, exploitation, and the viable roads for emancipation. They recover insights provided by classical traditions of political and social thought, but they also open new research directions adapted to the global challenges of our time.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Introduction
Abstract
This introduction explores the connections between feminism, capitalism, and critique and points to the significance of Nancy Fraser’s work within the current predicament.
Banu Bargu, Chiara Bottici
From Socialist Feminism to the Critique of Global Capitalism
Abstract
This chapter explores the trajectory of Nancy’s Fraser’s development from socialist feminism to the critique of global capitalism by focusing on five closely related themes: (1) the public sphere and feminist concerns; (2) justice, redistribution, and recognition; (3) rethinking Polanyi’s The Great Transformation; (4) prospects for a radical feminism; and (5) emancipation and the critique of neoliberal capitalism.
Richard J. Bernstein
Debates on Slavery, Capitalism and Race: Old and New
Abstract
Robin Blackburn discusses the role of slavery and emancipation, race and capitalism in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western world. He argues that the enslaving and racializing dynamic of capitalism was located in civil society while abolitionism sought to challenge the expansion of the “Slave Power.” However, it was the actuality or threat of revolutionary ruptures at the level of the state, and slave resistance that gave abolition the chance to suppress slavery. But the emancipatory project was fatally weakened by the success of armed white vigilantes in terrorizing blacks and denying them political rights. Authors discussed include David Brion Davis, Thomas Haskell, Eric Williams, W. E. B. Dubois, Nancy Fraser, Michael Dawson and Frank Wilderson.
Robin Blackburn
Feminism, Capitalism, and the Social Regulation of Sexuality
Abstract
The chapter discusses the role of sexuality in Marxist-feminist critiques of capitalism. Oksala begins by explicating three different feminist formulations of the relationship between capitalism and sexual regulation – Alexandra Kollontai’s, Catherine MacKinnon’s, and Judith Butler’s. In the second part, Oksala turns to Nancy Fraser’s thought and shows how she can be read as providing a fourth alternative, which avoids the problems of economic monism as well as reductive heterosexist conceptions of gender and sexual oppression.
Johanna Oksala
Capitalism’s Insidious Charm vs. Women’s and Sexual Liberation
Abstract
In her recent work on feminism and capitalism, Nancy Fraser has insisted on the necessity to resist the neoliberal cooptation of feminist discourse and to combine the critique of gender inequality with the critique of capitalism. Arruzza accepts Nancy Fraser’s invitation to think again about the structural connection between gender and sexual oppression and capitalist social relations. She critically discusses the liberal feminist notion that capitalism has led and can still lead to greater emancipation from gender and sexual oppression, and that the oppression of women and of sexuality is only a vestige of a pre-capitalist past. As capitalism generates gender and sexual oppression in various ways and new forms, these kinds of oppression cannot be considered simply as a remnant from a pre-capitalist past.
Cinzia Arruzza
The Long Life of Nancy Fraser’s “Rethinking the Public Sphere”
Abstract
Nancy Fraser’s path-breaking “Rethinking the Public Sphere” brought the term “subaltern counterpublics” into critical theoretical discourse. Four innovative directions developed in that essay have now become established in the discourse of deliberative democracy: (1) a focus on inequalities in deliberation; (2) a move, in understanding the public sphere, from Habermas’s unitary conception to Fraser’s plurality of contesting publics; (3) a move to include self-interest in deliberation, when self-interest is constrained by fairness and rights; (4) a move away from a sharp separation between civil society and state to considering these spheres interpenetrating and both subject to democratic norms. Fraser’s early insights continue to illuminate each development.
Jane Mansbridge
Feminism, Ecology, and Capitalism: Nancy Fraser’s Contribution to a Radical Notion of Critique as Disclosure
Abstract
This chapter will deal with questions about responsibility, agency, and world-framing settings. First, it deals with Iris Young’s conception of collective responsibility with capitalism and ecology and critically explores her shortcomings. Second, Lara discusses Joaquín Valdivielso’s conception of collective responsibility toward ecology, and discusses the failure of this position as well. The chapter argues that Nancy Fraser’s approach represents a third model that helps overcome the shortcomings of the two previous ones and that she is able to articulate a paradigm of agency and collective responsibility with a feminist approach that is strongly articulated within her critique of capitalism. In this way, Lara argues that her project involves setting a new way to look at certain problems related to agency and responsibility.
María Pía Lara
Recognition, Redistribution, and Participatory Parity: Where’s the Law?
Abstract
Critical theory, Nancy Fraser has recently claimed, is jettisoning its strengths for a narrow “legalism.” Fraser’s worry may be overstated. Frankfurt critical theory needs to provide a nuanced account of law and rights as part of both its normative and socio-theoretical endeavors. Fraser implicitly recognizes this point in her powerful rejoinder to Honneth. Nonetheless, her criticism raises a question about her contributions to critical theory. Do they provide an adequate basis formulating a critical theory of law? Though Fraser has admirably resisted flawed deconstructionist accounts of law, and also periodically opened the door to a rigorous discussion of legal matters, some implicit theoretical premises have apparently gotten in the way of her doing so.
William E. Scheuerman
(Parity of) Participation – The Missing Link Between Resources and Resonance
Abstract
This essay focuses on the debate between Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, and, more specifically, on whether social critique should focus on the resources for a good life (redistribution) or on the quality of social relationships (recognition) – or on both. In particular, Rosa argues that social criticism should focus on relationships indeed, but not just on social ones. The concept of resonance that he proposes is also crucial. If the process of appropriation (through participation) fails, we end up in states of alienation. And, as Fraser’s work suggests, under capitalist and patriarchal conditions, there is a high risk of this due to social acceleration, competition, and inequality.
Hartmut Rosa
Curbing the Absolute Power of Disembedded Financial Markets: The Grammar of Counter-Hegemonic Resistance and the Polanyian Narrative
Abstract
Engaging Nancy Fraser’s elaboration of Polanyi’s narrative, Ferrara argues that in our century the preponderance of finance over the “real economy,” the resurgence of rent and the virtualization of the economy lead to a new kind of “absolute power,” exerted by disembedded financial markets, against which the remedies that once curbed absolute power prove ineffective. The prospect for resistance against neoliberal hegemony is discussed with reference to Fraser’s views on social movements difficult to place within the Polanyian “double movement” and to her articulation of a “triple movement,” that combines elements of non-domination, negative liberty, and solidarity in new constellations. Attention is focused on the subjects of counter-hegemonic resistance and the novel entwinement of the legal and the political as terrains of resistance.
Alessandro Ferrara
Hegel and Marx: A Reassessment After One Century
Abstract
In recent decades a number of reinterpretations of Hegel’s social philosophy and Marx’s social theory have been carried out, which allows us to examine the relationship between the two thinkers in a perspective of fruitful complementarity. In this chapter, Honneth begins with a comparison of their respective philosophies of history (I). In a second step, the chapter explores the advantages of Hegel’s social theory vis-à-vis that of Marx (II). The third step consists in reversing the perspective and considering the merits of Marx’s analysis of capitalism (III). Finally, the question is raised of under what conditions and in what form the two approaches can be put into a relationship of productive complementarity.
Axel Honneth
Crisis, Contradiction, and the Task of a Critical Theory
Abstract
This chapter explores the connection between critique, conflict, and crisis. This move is indicative of a slight methodological shift within contemporary Critical Theory, where the focus on crises supplements the focus on social struggles. The extent to which Critical Theory should be interested in the struggles and desires of the age can then be qualified as follows: it is part of those struggles of an age which are capable of thematizing and addressing its inherent crises in an emancipatory way. In other words, through its criticism and analysis, Critical Theory contributes to addressing these crises (which clearly also give rise to regressive and non-emancipatory responses) in an emancipatory way.
Rahel Jaeggi
What’s Critical About a Critical Theory of Justice?
Abstract
In this article, Forst presents a critical theory of justice in dialogue with Nancy Fraser. Using the concept of justification as the connection between theory and practice allows us to de-reify concepts like justice, democracy, power or alienation – aiming to identify and overcome domination in various contexts of social life.
Rainer Forst
Beyond Kant Versus Hegel: An Alternative Strategy for Grounding the Normativity of Critique
Abstract
Much work in contemporary critical theory turns on the question of how to ground the normativity of critique. Many critical theorists have followed Jürgen Habermas’s lead and assumed that the available strategies for grounding critique are either Kantian or Hegelian or some combination of the two. In this paper, drawing inspiration from Nancy Fraser’s early conception of “social criticism without philosophy,” Allen develops an alternative approach to the normativity question, one that can take critical theory beyond Kant versus Hegel.
Amy Allen
Nancy Fraser and the Left: A Searching Idea of Equality
Abstract
All of Nancy Fraser’s work can be seen as a response to the crisis of the Left, which emerged in the 1960s and climaxed after 1989. In this article, Zaretsky situates Fraser’s work in relation to the Left, and to the evolution of critical theory, by combining his expertise as historian of the Left with his privileged observatory position as Nancy Fraser’s partner.
Eli Zaretsky
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Feminism, Capitalism, and Critique
Editors
Banu Bargu
Prof. Chiara Bottici
Copyright Year
2017
Electronic ISBN
978-3-319-52386-6
Print ISBN
978-3-319-52385-9
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52386-6