Memory, Narrative, and Rupture: The Power of the Past as a Resource for Political Change∗

In politics “soft” ideational factors are often dismissed in favor of “hard” quantifiable data. Since the “memory boom,” however, collective memory has become an important variable for explaining persistent grievances and cycles of hatred. Building on the work of Hannah Arendt and the first generation of the Frankfurt School, I seek to counterbalance the literature’s predominantly negative conception of memory by developing a constructive understanding of remembrance as a resource for rethinking politics in the aftermath of breaks in the narrative thread of historical time. My basic thesis is that historical ruptures shared by an entire generation can activate collective memory as a resource for reimagining political life. I show how Arendt and the critical theorists of the early Frankfurt School used the caesura of 1945 to rethink the meaning of the past and endorse new forms of political life in the aftermath of Europe’s age of total war

A case of communicative learning?: Rereading Habermas’s philosophical project through an Arendtian lens

Jürgen Habermas has sought to set critical theory on firm normative foundations by drawing on thinkers outside the canon of Western Marxism. My basic thesis is that Hannah Arendt is a crucial but underappreciated resource for his intellectual development. To make this point, I focus on Arendt’s importance for Habermas’s work on the public sphere in the 1960s and the social theory he developed in the 1970s and ‘80s, despite his reluctance to cite her writings in his early career. More generally, I argue that rereading Habermas’s critical theory through Arendt’s political thought helps to clarify the importance of politics within his work, thus countering accusations that he is an abstract thinker of “high liberalism” who is uninterested in “real politics.” A greater appreciation of Arendt’s work as a condition of possibility for Habermas’s philosophy demonstrates the importance of reading their work together as part of a common project

Impure theorizing in an imperfect world: Politics, utopophobia and critical theory in Geuss’s realism

An “impure” realism that draws extensively on non-philosophical sources has challenged mainstream political theory in recent years. These “new realists” reject the “political moralism” of “ethics-first” approaches, holding that theory should start from disagreement and conflict. My basic thesis is that its focus on “the political” and its utopophobia prevent realism from developing normative foundations that can ground social criticism. Many realists, including one of its primary progenitors, Raymond Geuss, recognize this problem. Interestingly, Geuss turns to critical theory to address this concern. While I welcome realism’s desire to make political theory more relevant to politics, I argue that Geuss’s attempt to address the status quo bias by importing ideology critique from the Frankfurt School is ultimately unsuccessful. In my reading the critical theory of the Frankfurt School thus emerges as a more plausible approach to grounding critique of the pathologies of the present

Against international criminal tribunals: reconciling the global justice norm with local agency

Understood as the need to address official crimes committed under the previous regime, a global norm of transitional justice has emerged since the end of the cold war. Combined with the postwar resurgence of international law and institutions, this has resulted in the increased use of international criminal tribunals to prosecute state-sponsored human rights violations. While I acknowledge the positive aspects of these developments, I argue that such tribunals are inadequate vehicles for justice for two reasons: (1) they are divorced from the affected communities; and (2) they conceive of historical justice too narrowly. Building on the discursive cosmopolitanism of Jürgen Habermas and Seyla Benhabib, I contend that respecting local traditions and desires is crucial to achieving justice. I lay the groundwork for a contextual universalism that respects international legal norms while stimulating discourse in the community where they occurred, so that victims and perpetrators can live together as members of the same polity once more

Integration after totalitarianism: Arendt and Habermas on the postwar imperatives of memory

Collective memories of totalitarianism and the industrialized slaughter of the Holocaust have exerted a profound influence on postwar European politics and philosophy. Two of the most prominent political theorists and public intellectuals to take up the legacy of total war are Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas. However, their prescriptions seem to pull in opposite directions. While Arendt draws on remembrance to recover politics on a smaller scale by advocating for the empowerment of local councils, Habermas draws on the past to justify his search for postnational forms of political community that can overcome the bloody legacy of nationalism. My argument brings these two perspectives together by examining their mutual support for European integration as a way of preserving the lessons of totalitarianism. I argue that both Arendt and Habermas reject the technocratic tendencies of the European Union while maintaining hope that it can develop a truly postnational form of politics

Habermas’s Theological Turn and European Integration

Jürgen Habermas’s recent work is defined by two trends: an engagement with the realm of the sacred and a concern for the future of the European Union. Despite the apparent lack of connection between these themes, I argue the early history of European integration has important implications for his conclusions about the place of faith in public life. Although Habermas’s work on religion suggests that the sacred contains important normative resources for postsecular democracies, he continues to bar explicitly religious justifications from discourse in state institutions. I question this exclusion of the sacred by historically reconstructing the role that political Catholicism played in the early history of integration. Focusing on two of the most important actors involved in the creation of the first European Community, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, I show how the explicitly religious reasons can broaden political perspectives, resulting in the creation of new, inclusive postnational forms of communal life. Pushing Habermas to accept the implications of his theological turn, I argue that pluralistic, nondogmatic and nonauthoritarian religious claims should be allowed to enter into the formal public sphere through a discursively determined interpretation of secular translation

Capitalism and unfree labour : a review of Marxist perspectives on modern slavery

Contrary to the expectations of liberal and neoclassical economists, as well as many Marxists, the deepening and extension of capitalism appear to be heightening the prevalence of unfree labor. By most accounts, the forms of exploitation encapsulated within unfree labor – including those typically referred to as forced labor, human trafficking and modern slavery – are proliferating in the global economy, including in advanced capitalist societies. We evaluate these developments in light of the relationship between capitalism and unfree labor through the prism of Marxism, revealing a deep-seated divide between a neo-Smithian reading, according to which capitalism and unfree labor are incompatible, and a more faithful Marxist tradition that views forced labor as one possible form of labor control and exploitation under capitalism. Building on this second tradition, we argue that international political economy scholars who seek to shed light into the contemporary and historic dynamics of unfree labor must transcend the rigid theoretical binaries that have long characterized Marxist debates on capitalism and unfree labor