Content uploaded by Mark Haugaard
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Mark Haugaard on Apr 01, 2016
Content may be subject to copyright.
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rpow20
Download by: [National University of Ireland - Galway] Date: 01 April 2016, At: 09:25
Journal of Power
ISSN: 1754-0291 (Print) 1754-0305 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpow20
Power and critical theory
Mark Haugaard & Maeve Cooke
To cite this article: Mark Haugaard & Maeve Cooke (2010) Power and critical theory, Journal of
Power, 3:1, 1-5
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17540291003647530
Published online: 19 Mar 2010.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 272
View related articles
Journal of Power
Vol. 3, No. 1, April 2010, 1–5
ISSN 1754-0291 print/ISSN 1754-0305 online
© 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17540291003647530
http://www.informaworld.com
EDITORIAL
Power and critical theory
Taylor and FrancisRPOW_A_463541.sgm10.1080/17540291003630320Journal of Power1754-0291 (print)/1754-0305 (online)Editorial2010Taylor & Francis310000002010
Critical theory is the name given to a tradition of critical reflection on society inspired
by Marx and, before him, Hegel and Rousseau. It looks critically at social structures
and social institutions from the point of view of their dominating effects on individual
human subjects. The term is commonly used to designate the particular line of critical
reflection on society that developed in Germany from the 1920s onwards and became
known as the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School; familiar names here are
Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse. This tradition continues today in the writings of
Habermas, Honneth and others.
The members of the Frankfurt School set out to develop a critique of domination
that was both normatively and sociologically informed. Its emphasis on sociological
research distinguishes this line of critique of domination from mainstream political
philosophy, which typically focuses on finding normative criteria of justice that would
serve as the basis for critique; a contemporary example is Rawls’ construction of the
original position. These normative criteria tend to be conceptualized in agent-centred
terms; the corresponding conception of power tends to be similarly agent-centred and
to take singular episodes of power as paradigmatic.
As argued by Martin Saar in the first article of this issue (pp. 7–20), since Rous-
seau there has been growing awareness among social theorists that the most insidious
forms of domination do not arise from discrete agent-centred relations. Rather they are
constituted through social forces that are largely the unintended effect of social
actions. This is a sociological insight of the kind that led Weber to argue that moder-
nity has the potential to constitute a bureaucratic steel cage of instrumental rationality
and, prior to this, made Marx reluctant to blame capitalists for capitalism. In the work
of Adorno and Horkheimer, as Vanessa Lemm shows (this issue, pp. 75–95), this
systemic process of domination was theorized in terms of the negative consequences
of enlightenment brought about by human separation from nature.
If domination is not simply a question of discrete acts between agents, then the
project of emancipation entails combining the normative task of finding criteria of
justice with the sociological task of understanding the social nature of domination as
a systemic phenomenon. Saar suggests (this issue, p. 9) that the duality of the normative
and the sociological approaches has its counterpart in the modern tradition of thinking
about power; here, too, there are two approaches. The first, which has it origins in
Hobbes, conceptualizes power in terms of discrete, agent-centred acts of domination.
This line of thinking is exemplified by Weber’s conception of power as actors over-
coming resistance (Weber 1978, p. 53) and Dahl’s formulation of A getting B to do
something which B would not otherwise have done (Dahl 1957). The line of thinking,
which Saar attributes to Spinoza (this issue, p. 10), views power as a capacity that
derives from a person’s social ontology, or being-in-the-world. Saar links this with
Arendt’s view of power as a capacity concept, whereby the real focus of power is not
Downloaded by [National University of Ireland - Galway] at 09:25 01 April 2016
2 Editorial
the negative power of domination but the positive power, the power to, which enables
action in the first place. This concept of power is manifest in contemporary Foucault-
inspired analysis in which the critique of power is not focused upon discrete acts of
sovereign or state power. The emphasis instead is on the processes whereby humans
are constituted as social agents, as social subjects, with certain powers and dispositions.
The realization of their dispositions appears to agents as the realization of their freedom.
Thus, freedom constitutes a fulfilment of their subject dispositions. Yet, their consti-
tution as subjects is at the same time a form of domination. This turns on its head the
usually perceived opposition between domination and freedom. As argued by Rens van
Munster in his review article (this issue, pp. 127–134), it is through their freedoms that
modern liberal subjects are dominated.
In many respects the Frankfurt School perception of the task of critical theory as
being both normative and sociologically sensitive lends itself naturally to the
Foucauldian constitutive view of power. However, within the School there is a
tendency to revert to an agent-centred, episodic view of power. In other words, while
Critical Theorists base their conceptions of domination on sociological insights into
complex systemic forces, their views of power often remains the agent-centred,
episodic conception typical of mainstream political philosophy.
Amy Allen argues that Honneth’s account of recognition seeks to take account of
Foucauldian perceptions, yet remains tied to an agent-centred, conflict-based view of
power (this issue, pp. 21–32). While his concept of recognition replaces what he sees
as the unsatisfactory fiction of power-free communication found in Habermas, he
conceives of domination as arising in episodes of misrecognition that manifest them-
selves in conflict and social struggles. Even complex social processes such as those
captured by the concepts of reification and ideology are theorized as interactive fail-
ures. The latter point is emphasized by David Owen (this issue, pp. 97–109). He
argues that Honneth’s theorization of forms of domination such as reification and
ideology does not provide conceptual space for a subject of disciplinary power that is
not an agent whose autonomy is simply blocked externally; it leaves no room for a
Foucauldian view of the subject of power, in which domination takes place through
the reproduction of a social ontology that is actualized within historically specific
social practices.
To illustrate this process Allen offers a description of a young girl, Elizabeth, who,
in a single stroke, receives both parental love and a subordinating ideology regarding
gender (this issue, pp. 25–26). Since she absorbs gender-subordination, love and
recognition at one and the same time, Elizabeth is subordinated in a way that produces
no struggle. She constitutes a socially constructed being-in-the-world for whom inter-
active success, thus ontological security, becomes associated with certain predisposi-
tions of self; these become part of her second nature, tacit consciousness or habitus.
The salient feature of this form of domination is Elizabeth’s lack of resistance – the
absence of conflict and struggle.
Allen suggests that Elizabeth’s domination requires a conception of positive power
as a process of subject constitution. A different aspect of positive power is highlighted
by Eva Erman (this issue, pp. 33–51). Erman discusses Pettit’s Republican reworking
of the liberal view of freedom as absence of interference by another. For Pettit, the
fact that actors find themselves potentially subject to the power of another is sufficient
to constitute unfreedom or domination. In other words, there can be domination even
in the absence of the exercise of power in the negative sense of blocking the subject’s
freedom externally. This view of domination lends itself to the Foucauldian idea that
Downloaded by [National University of Ireland - Galway] at 09:25 01 April 2016
Journal of Power 3
domination is bound up with the constitution of the subject in social disciplinary
processes. Pettit’s work, however, does not pursue this Foucauldian insight; rather its
view of power is an exclusively agent-centred one, reminiscent of Dahl. Erman takes
issue with Pettit’s conception of domination, focusing on the view of agency under-
pinning it. While commending Pettit for his intersubjective approach to agency, she
argues that it is too thin even for his own purposes of theorizing freedom as non-domi-
nation. A particular weakness here is his neglect of the dimension of intersubjective
recognition. By way of contrast, Erman considers Brandom’s and Habermas’ thicker
accounts of agency in terms of the recognition of others as participants in a discursive
process of asking for and giving reasons. Their weakness, however, is an overly
formalistic and impersonal account of discourse; both Brandom and Habermas pay too
little attention to those aspects of discursive engagement that locate us as embodied
beings in the space of reasons. At first glance, Honneth’s recognition-theoretical
account of agency might seem to offer a promising alternative. Erman argues,
however, that this is not the case, principally because it has too little to say about the
discursive dimension of freedom. Furthermore, like Allen and Owen, she holds that
Honneth pays insufficient attention to the ways in which the subject is constituted as
a subject of freedom and domination.
Pettit’s conception of freedom is part of a Republican view of politics in which
citizenship is something for which subjects must qualify: it is a status that is conferred
on them by virtue of their participation in public dialogical processes. While modern
democrats tend to take this status for granted, forms of domination such as Apartheid
remind us that it had to be fought for and won. Erman concludes that we need a thicker
account of agency than Pettit, Brandom, Habermas or Honneth offer, if we are to be
able to show how subjects can qualify as citizens; in other words, how they are consti-
tuted as subjects who are politically and individually autonomous. Drawing on the
work of Kukla and Lance, she outlines the shape of such an account.
If freedom and the critique of domination entail the interrogation of the constitu-
tion of subjects in social processes, what does this mean for social critique? It
certainly entails, as argued by Saar (this issue, p. 17), that we are sensitive to the
historical contingencies that constitute us as social subjects. In addition, it seems to
suggest that even the process of subject constitution as conceptualized by Foucault,
which involves bio-power and discipline, is not simply a process of domination; it
calls on us to take seriously the possibility that it is also a process that has the poten-
tial to contribute to the creation of critical social subjects who are able to win the
status of citizens.
In her article (this issue, pp. 75–95), Vanessa Lemm argues that such an affir-
mative theory of bio-power is implicit in Horkheimer and Adorno’s appropriation
of Nietzsche’s critique of enlightenment. Their critique of enlightenment reads the
history of European civilization as a process of domination that culminates in the
logic of capitalism. The key feature of this process is a relation to nature as some-
thing to be controlled and exploited. The result is the constitution of the modern
subject as a being estranged from external and internal nature – from nature outside
of and within the self. Lemm draws on Nietzsche’s conceptions of second nature,
his account of the antagonism between culture and civilization and on his concept
of Anschauungsmetapher in order to show how a non-dominating relation to exter-
nal and internal nature might be possible. Such a relation could be expressed in
terms of an affirmative bio-power that entails a reintegration of humans back into
nature.
Downloaded by [National University of Ireland - Galway] at 09:25 01 April 2016
4 Editorial
The idea of an affirmative bio-power also occurs in Patrick O’Mahony’s critique
of Habermas (this issue, pp. 53–73). Like Erman, O’Mahony criticizes Habermas’
concept of communicative power for over-emphasizing the procedural aspects of
communication and neglecting the interacting agents themselves. O’Mahony main-
tains that Habermas’ normative theory of communicative action, together with the
normative concepts of justice and legitimacy that are based on it, rests on a particular
picture of a social subject. In this picture, the ways in which rational subjects develop
as individual agents by way of learning processes are foregrounded, while the
complex social processes that make possible such learning fade into the background.
O’Mahony argues that Habermasian discourse theory requires a theory of affirmative
bio-politics that shows how subjects capable of participation in rational discourses
are constituted.
If bio-politics raises issues that challenge the proceduralism of Habermas’ theory
of communicative action, it also raises questions for Honneth’s theory of recognition.
Like Habermas, Honneth seeks to identify the ‘grammar’ or rules governing intersub-
jective practices of recognition. However, as is argued by Owen (this issue, pp. 97–
109), his concern with rules leads to a picture of subjects as agents who are somehow
separate from their social practices. As the late Wittgenstein showed, practices of
recognition can never be reduced simply to rule-following. Drawing on Collingwood,
Owen argues that we need an expressivist approach, in which non-pathological inter-
action is seen as constituting an externalization of agency. When one agent recognizes
another, she does not recognize him as a type of individual, subsuming him under a
specific rule (X-people always x); rather, the interaction expresses a mutual conver-
gence of experiences of individuality – an idea reminiscent of the Adornian/
Nietzschean call for a relationship between human beings and nature that is no longer
mediated by the categories of interpretation inherited from capitalism.
Domination through the construction of particular forms of subject is not just
particular to modernity, it is prefigured in pre-modern societies. In his account of
Adorno’s theory of traditional forms of domination, Duncan Russell (this issue,
pp. 111–126) argues that pre-capitalist society presupposed agents whose interpreta-
tive schemata of causality was inextrically tied to the feudal world, with its reverence
for essences, teleology and the great-chain-of-being. Not alone do pre-capitalist and
capitalist societies create their own subjects, as is argued by Stewart Clegg in his
review (this issue, pp. 143–146), globalization also entails the creation of new kinds
of subjects constituted to the needs of corporate capitalism.
It would appear that each age has its own contingent forms of subject constitution
and, hence, also of domination. The contributions to this issue view critical theory as
interrogating the formation of each historically contingent, ‘local’, being-in-the-
world. At the same time, however, they acknowledge that such ontological critiques
require some external criteria of evaluation. It is not enough to say that a particular
form of subject is contingent, that it could be otherwise. Over and above this, criteria
of evaluation are required – a challenge that is ducked by many post-structuralist
followers of Foucault. The strength of critical theory is its endeavour to meet this chal-
lenge. Finding such criteria brings us back to conceptual devices, such as recognition.
Yet the challenge remains of how to reformulate these criteria in a creative manner
that takes account of power as constitutive and recognizes the fact that freedom and
domination are not simple opposites. Meeting this challenge entails the sharpening
and reshaping of normative conceptual tools, most of which were formulated using the
vocabulary of power as agency-centred, episodic domination, to make them suitable
Downloaded by [National University of Ireland - Galway] at 09:25 01 April 2016
Journal of Power 5
for the complex task posed by the radical problematization of the social subject and
the constitutive view of power that emerges from it.
Mark Haugaard and Maeve Cooke
Mark.Haugaard@nuigalway.ie
Maeve.Cooke@ucd.ie
References
Dahl, R., 1957. The concept of power. Behavioural Science, 2, 201–215.
Weber, M., 1978. Economy and society: an outline of interpretative sociology. G. Roth and C.
Wittich, eds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Downloaded by [National University of Ireland - Galway] at 09:25 01 April 2016
