Emancipatory imperative: a critical theory of social transformation
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Date
30/08/2022Item status
Restricted AccessEmbargo end date
30/08/2023Author
Slothuus, Lukas
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Abstract
In this thesis, I argue for the importance of an emancipatory imperative in political
theory. While early 20th century critical theory offered promising resources for thinking
about the liberation from social and economic unfreedom, particularly through Antonio
Gramsci and the first-generation Frankfurt School, late 20th and 21st century political
theory frequently forgoes emancipation as a key aim. How can such an emancipatory
imperative be developed and defended today?
In order to probe this question, I interrogate the foundational idea of critical theory as
emancipation and enlightenment. While enlightenment can often serve anti-emancipatory ends, so can outright rejections by retreating into the territory of
piecemeal reform or even defending the status quo. I bring together Gramsci and the
Frankfurt School with important recent advances in feminist work on political affect
and critical work on race and colonialism to recalibrate enlightenment in a critical and
emancipatory direction, thus insisting on the need for a commitment to emancipation
and enlightenment alike.
Through an in-depth critical reading of three wide-ranging influential political theorists
– John Rawls, James C. Scott, and Chantal Mouffe – I show how their understandings
of enlightenment all contribute to such departures from emancipation. By
reconsidering the role of reason and rationalism through the prisms of collectivity,
material interest, antagonistic struggle, and affect, I critically recalibrate enlightenment
away from its anti-emancipatory and oppressive forms toward an emancipatory
enlightenment between hyper-rationalism and anti-rationalism. I then propose a
renewed critical emancipation to overcome the problems of political, human, and
negative understandings of emancipation. While Rawls is overly committed to an
enlightenment understanding of reason and rationalism, Scott is overly critical of these
in his anti-rationalism from above. In both cases, this leads the theorist down a path
incompatible with emancipation. Mouffe bridges the reason-affect divide and gets
closer to the possibility of locating the imperative of critical emancipation, yet by
eschewing the importance of material interest vis-à-vis affect she jeopardises the
possibility of a transformed world beyond radicalised liberal democracy.
By (re)turning to Gramsci’s work on affect and his conception of a secular-political and
materialist faith in particular, I develop a vision of an emancipatory imperative better
attuned to the politics of affect in a material context. In light of this reconceptualization,
I conclude by outlining the role of the critical theorist vis-à-vis emancipatory politics
and emancipatory political theory through self-reflexive rearguard legitimation and
comradely critique. Such a vision helps develop political theory committed to
emancipation today and paves the way for renewed scholarship in the critical theory
tradition. I hence add two main contributions to the field: First, I challenge recent
attempts to embrace Rawls, Scott, and Mouffe as theorists useful for emancipation
through a novel focus particularly on the role of emancipation and enlightenment in
their work. Second, I contribute to the contemporary critical theory tradition’s debates
on the limits of enlightenment for emancipation, in the process advancing debates on
the relationship between theory and practice, and the theorists’ role in relation to these.