allen, forst and haugaard - power and reason, justice and domination
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Through an email conversation between Allen, Forst and Haugaard, this article explores the relationship between the dyads power and reason, justice and domination. In much of the literature reason is considered either a mode ofemancipation from power (Lukes) or, conversely, a subtle ruse of domination(Foucault). Here it is argued that reasoning is intrinsic to political power, with both the potential for power as justice (Arendt), and for power as domination (Foucault and Lukes). With power and reason as normatively neutral, with both/either normatively desirable and undesirable potentials, this raises the fundamental question of how to distinguish between justice and domination. These issues are explored, taking account of processes of subject formation and systems ofthought.TRANSCRIPT
Power and reason, justice and domination: a conversation
Amy Allena, Rainer Forstb and Mark Haugaardc*
aDepartment of Philosophy, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA; bGoethe Universität,Frankfurt am Main, Germany; cSchool of Political Science and Sociology, National
University of Galway, Galway, Ireland
Through an email conversation between Allen, Forst and Haugaard, this articleexplores the relationship between the dyads power and reason, justice anddomination. In much of the literature reason is considered either a mode ofemancipation from power (Lukes) or, conversely, a subtle ruse of domination(Foucault). Here it is argued that reasoning is intrinsic to political power, withboth the potential for power as justice (Arendt), and for power as domination(Foucault and Lukes). With power and reason as normatively neutral, with both/either normatively desirable and undesirable potentials, this raises the fundamen-tal question of how to distinguish between justice and domination. These issuesare explored, taking account of processes of subject formation and systems ofthought.
Keywords: power; reason; justice; domination; subjectification
Mark Haugaard: As things stand, the power debates are divided between theoristswho see reason as a subtle ruse of power, leading to domination, and theorists whoconsider reason as the key to overcoming domination in its most sophisticatedforms. Paradigmatically, this opposition is represented by Foucault’s assertion thatnothing could be more sterile than to use reason to critique power (Foucault 1983,p. 210), which is diametrically opposed to Lukes’ argument that freedom, asopposed to domination, entails living autonomously according to the dictates ofreason (Lukes 2005, p. 115). We have Nietzsche against Kant, which are usuallyconsidered incommensurable. However, it seems to me that the way forward is notto take sides – siding with either Nietzsche/Foucault against Kant/Lukes – rather itis to recognize that both positions have some truth to them.
In more its most subtle forms, when not manifestly coercive, modes of domina-tion are reproduced through the reasoned consent of subaltern actors. In the thirddimension of power (Lukes 2005), or hegemony (Gramsci 1998), actors becomepart of a system of thought, or a habitus (Bourdieu 1977), in which certain formsof domination become perceived of as reasonable because they constitute part of ataken-for-granted, second nature, knowledge which appears as the natural order ofthings. In the fourth dimension of power (Digeser 1992), in which actors becomeattached to subaltern subject positions, as both subjects and objects of knowledge(Foucault 1983), they come to see specific forms of identity as not only attractivebut also locally episodically empowering, even though these identities may
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
Journal of Political Power, 2014Vol. 7, No. 1, 7–33, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2014.887540
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legitimate domination. Thus, to use your example, (Allen 2010), which also cameup in a previous exchange (Honneth et al. 2010), in the gendering of a femaleactor, she is rewarded in childhood with love for being pretty, charming, and atten-tive to the needs of others, which entails the creation of a subject position that shewill not only come to be attracted to (the subject position being associated withontologically security from childhood) but she will also find structuring this posi-tion locally episodically empowering, as other actors respond positively to herbecause she is occupying a structurally recognizably appropriate subject position.This renders it reasonable for her to adopt, what are, in essence, relatively subalternroles, when viewed from a structural and systemic perspective (see Allen 2007).However, the success of these more subtle forms of power, which rely on local per-ceptions of reasonableness to reinforce domination, does not entail that we shouldaccept the hypothesis that the use of reason solely constitutes a mode of domina-tion. The willingness of actors to consent to domination through reason is not sim-ply ‘false consciousness’, a sign of defectiveness, it also suggests that some of thetime reason must also be a mode of emancipation, a road to relative freedom orjustice. To borrow conceptual vocabulary from Habermas (1984), the most effectiveform of instrumental manipulation takes place when instrumental action appears ascommunicative interaction. Thus, the success of this kind of manipulative instru-mental action is parasitic upon, and presupposes, genuine communicative action.Similarly, the third and fourth dimensions of power presuppose that the use of rea-son is, indeed, in actors’ interests some of the time. Otherwise, these dimensions ofpower are premised upon actors who are hoodwinked all of the time, which eitherentails an over-socialized concept of agency (agents as cultural dupes/dopes), orthat these actors are defective in some way (which is the source of the elitist impli-cations of the term ‘false consciousness’) or a conspiracy theory (the subalterns arebeing brainwashed by an elite) – all of which are theoretically indefensible hypoth-eses. Therefore, I think you may well be right, Rainer, that the underlying principleof justice lies in reasoned interactive justification between actors (Forst 2012)which is, ironically, demonstrated by the use of reason for the purposes of domina-tion. However, this entails that we must recognize that what appears as reasonedjustification can also be the tool of power as domination in its most subtle forms.
In distinguishing power/reason which leads to justice, from power/reason thatentails domination, I think it is important to remember that it is not simply a ques-tion of distinguishing normatively desirable from undesirable modes of reason, orreason from rationalizations, it is equally important to realize that power is alsonormatively divided between normatively desirable and undesirable power. Poweris usually assumed to equate with domination. Even when Foucault states thatpower is ‘positive’, it seems to me that he has in mind ‘positive’ only in the empir-ical sense of being constitutive of reality, for instance: ‘We must cease once andfor all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it “excluded” … In fact,power produces: it produces reality;…’ (Foucault 1979, p. 194). His frequentinjunctions for us to resist power and subjectivisation – ‘Maybe the target nowa-days is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are’ (Foucault 1983,p. 216), and assertions such as, ‘[d]omination is in fact a general structure of power…’ (Foucault 1983, p. 226), suggest that he took for granted that power was nor-matively undesirable, yet inescapable. In contrast, in much of your work (Allen1998, 1999, 2001), by drawing upon Arendt’s normatively positive characterizationof power, as the capacity to act in concert (Arendt 1970, p. 44), you have shown
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that the power family entails not only power-over, but also power-to and power-with. The latter two are normatively desirable and, in many instances, such asauthority, power over is also normatively commendable. Further to this latter point,I have also argued that normatively commendable power over is intrinsic to thedemocratic process (Haugaard 2010, 2012). Thus, in distinguishing forms ofpower/reason, relative to justice and domination, it is not only reason which wemust consider normatively Janus-faced, it is also power; or maybe you both dis-agree with this analysis and suggested mode of proceeding?
Amy Allen: First of all, I want to say thank you to Mark for suggesting this con-versation and for providing such a compelling and fruitful opening to the discussion.
I agree wholeheartedly with the two major points that you have raised, which Iwould summarize as follows. First, we should understand reason as Janus-faced,which means that it is capable of, on the one hand, rationalizing and justifying rela-tions of domination by generating hegemonic, taken-for-granted, naturalized systemsof thought that make domination seem reasonable even to the dominated, and, onthe other hand, of empowering subordinated individuals to resist their subordination,both individually and collectively, by, for example, enabling them to demand justifi-cation for their condition (Forst 2012). Second, we should resist the strong tendencyin the literature on power to conflate power with power-over and power-over withdomination, and should instead understand power as Janus-faced as well, in that itcan take normatively desirable and normatively objectionable forms.
This second point is one that I have argued for in some of my earlier work onpower, as Mark mentioned, though here I would just make one small, but I think,important point, which may or may not constitute a difference between our views.On my view, all forms of power – and not only power-over – are Janus faced ornormatively bivalent in the way that Mark described. Just as power-over can takebenign, non-dominating forms, power-to and power-with, though typically associ-ated with benign and empowering capacities, can reinforce and uphold domination.In this way, I part company with Arendt, who views power as she defines it – asthe human ability not just to act but to act in concert – as an end in itself, that is,as having intrinsic normative value (Arendt 1970, cf. Allen 1999). Conflicts or dis-agreements often arise over whether a particular relation of power is normativelybenign or objectionable. For example, is a teacher’s exercise of power over her stu-dent a benign attempt to empower the student or a part of an authoritarian educa-tional system designed to produce docile, obedient subjects? Is a young woman’sembrace of her sexual empowerment – think Lady Gaga and Girls, or, if you aremy age, Madonna and Sex and the City – an act of resistance to a patriarchal sex-ual order that denies women’s sexual desire and freedom or is it a capitulation to asexual order that defines women as objects for male sexual pleasure? Is a collectivesocial or political exercise of power-with such as the Tea Party or Occupy WallStreet a force for emancipatory change or a reactionary defense of the status quo?
Of course the difficult question with respect to all of these examples is: how arewe to distinguish between normatively benign or beneficial and normatively prob-lematic and objectionable relations of power, whether they are relations of power-over, power-to, or power-with? Here is where an appeal to reason often comes in,and if we follow what Mark has identified as the Kantian line, then reason is allwe need to make such distinctions, for we can say that relations of power are nor-matively benign just so long as they can be defended by appeal to reasons (usuallyunder certain sorts of idealized procedural conditions) and they are normatively
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problematic just so long as they cannot be so defended. If, however, we accept theJanus-faced nature of reason then things become more complicated. If reason servesboth to stabilize hegemonic structures of domination and to critique such structuresof power, then how can an appeal to reason enable us to distinguish betweenbenign and objectionable forms of power?
A possible way out is to distinguish between actually existing or merely defacto rational agreement or consensus (e.g. about whether existing relations ofpower are normatively benign or not) and some stronger notion of what makesrational agreement on such matters normatively legitimate. Such a distinctionappeals to a meta-level principle of reason or justification – what Habermas used tocall the ideal speech situation (1984) – which is itself presumed to transcend exist-ing relations of domination – in fact, it is thought to model the very idea of non-domination. On this view, even though actually existing practices of reasoning arealways, as a matter of fact and in the real world, entangled with relations of power,good and bad, the meta-level principle itself is not; hence, it can provide the crite-rion by means of which we distinguish between merely de facto and legitimate rea-sons for or justifications of our normative assessments about power relations.However, if we assume, as Mark has argued elsewhere (Haugaard forthcoming),that there is no such meta-level principle to be had – “there is no transcendentalreason with a capital R’ (p. 28) – because conditions of reasonableness are createdthrough being socialized into a local habitus, to use Bourdieu’s term, then weappear to be back where we started.
But this line of thought needn’t lead us to abandon reason or to deny its positiveemancipatory effects. It is compatible with the belief that reason is a powerful toolfor unmasking and contesting relations of domination, and that being able to giveand ask for reasons (and to have one’s reasons be taken seriously and one’s requestsfor justification be heard and honored in a non-patronizing way) is empowering andcan, under certain social and historical conditions, be a crucial part of transformingand overcoming relations of domination. What it does rule out is the idea that ourconception of reason can be thought of as context-transcendent – that way lies whatLaclau calls pernicious ideological closure (Laclau 1996; for helpful discussion, seeCooke 2006, pp. 100–104); or what Mark has identified as a reification of aparticular, local conception of reason that leads to domination (Haugaardforthcoming, p. 37).
In saying this, I actually take myself to be building on an insight of Foucault’s,and, hence, I would quibble with Mark’s claim, in his opening remarks, that Fou-cault sides against Kant and hence against reason. As I read him, when Foucaultsays ‘shall we try reason?’ in the passage that Mark mentioned above, he meansnot ‘shall we give reason a try?’ but, rather, ‘shall we put reason on trial’ i.e. forits entanglements with power? It is this latter move of which Foucault says ‘noth-ing would be more sterile’ (1983, p. 210). As critical theorists, we must constantlyask ourselves, as Foucault puts it elsewhere:
How can we exist as rational beings, fortunately committed to practicing a rationalitythat is unfortunately crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers? … If critical thought itself hasa function … it is precisely to accept this sort of spiral, this sort of revolving door ofrationality that refers us to its necessity, to its indispensability, and, at the same time,to its intrinsic dangers. (2000, p. 358)
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Rainer Forst: Like Amy, I would like to start by saying thanks to Mark for invitingus to have this discussion and for opening it with his inspiring and challengingremarks. I am happy to engage in this discourse with two extremely powerful theo-rists of power from whose work I have learned a great deal.
I agree with both Mark and Amy that we need dialectical accounts of bothpower and reason: of power as a practice of domination and as a practice of eman-cipation (and lots of possible in-betweens) as well as of reasoning as a means ofdomination or subordination and as a weapon of critique (most importantly of self-critique) in a Kantian sense. So I would say, like Amy and Mark, that any sociallysituated form of reasoning, i.e. established sets of reasons and of what counts asreasonable, can be expressions of hegemonic forms of thought and possibly of anideology, masking the unjustifiable as justified. But if we say that, and especially ifwe engage in a certain critical social analysis of such a set of justifications, wehave to appeal to certain standards of justification that transcend that very context.So if Amy says that we cannot have such context-transcendent standards, I fear Imust disagree, for then the very talk of critique as ‘unmasking’ (see above) falsejustifications would have no basis. We would just replace one form of justificationwith another to our liking. For such a critique to be justified, we need to appeal tocertain standards of justification that transcend existing ones for the better while atthe same time insisting that we will have to criticize our own critique if it repro-duces new forms of one-sided and false justifications (as it possibly would). But ifhere Amy means – citing Mark on the impossibility of having access to a pure andtranscendent form of reason – that context-transcendence in the sense of no longerrequiring any self-critique is impossible, then I agree – for that would be justanother metaphysical slumber.
Reason is the very faculty of critique, and as Kant said, it is therefore essen-tially self-directed:
Reason must subject itself to critique in all its undertakings, and cannot restrict thefreedom of critique through any prohibition without damaging itself … (…) The veryexistence of reason depends upon this freedom, which has no dictatorial authority, butwhose claim is never anything more than the agreement of free citizens, each ofwhom must be able to express his reservations, indeed even his veto, without holdingback. (Kant 1781/87, A 738–739, B 766–767)
But for that it needs certain standards, and an essential one is that one needs togive appropriate reasons to justify the assertions one makes – so if one holds a cer-tain moral norm or interpretation of justice to be justified, one needs to be able andwilling to make good on that claim with reasons that are not rejectable with recip-rocally and generally justifiable reasons. The criteria of reciprocity and generalitywe arrive at recursively from reflecting on the validity claim of a moral norm or anorm of justice (that claims reciprocal and general validity), thus transforming thesecriteria into criteria of mutual justification. Such justification – in practice or inmente – is always a fallible and imperfect enterprise, but it is imperative given theprinciple of justification as a principle of reason. In practical contexts, to make along story awfully short, this entails what I call a right to justification because prac-tical reason entails not just knowledge of how one would have to justify one’smoral claims but also that one must do so.
Essential for our discussion, however, is the question of the immanent relationbetween reason (or reasoning), reasons and power. This is how I see things (cf.
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Forst 2013c): I think that power is a noumenal phenomenon, to say it paradoxi-cally, and that we must place it solely in the space of reasons and of justifications(which might be controversial among us). We need a cognitive account of powerthat is neutral as to its positive or negative evaluation (we agree on the latteraspect). So let us define power initially as the capacity of A to motivate B to thinkor do something that B would otherwise not have thought or done. It is not part ofthat definition whether this is done for good or bad reasons, for the sake of or con-trary to B’s interests, or by which means. But it is essential that power is exercisedby agents over other agents as beings guided by reasons (and in that sense, ‘free’agents). The means of the exercise of power can be a ‘powerful’ argument, a well-founded recommendation, an ideological description of the world, a seduction, anorder that is accepted, or a threat that is perceived as real.
Different from the exercise of physical force or violence, power rests onrecognition and acceptance. This is not necessarily a positive form of acceptance(as Arendt thought), for the threat that is perceived as real is in that very momentalso recognized and gives one a reason for action intended by A. But if, as happensin some cases, the threat by the blackmailer or the kidnapper is no longer seen asserious, their power disappears. They can still use brute force and kill thekidnapped person, but that is rather a sign of having lost power (either over thosewho are not willing to pay or over the kidnapped person, who refuses to recognizethe kidnapper as dominant and does not comply). Power is what goes on in thehead, and what goes on is recognition of a reason to act in a certain way. Powerrests on perceived and recognized, accepted justifications (from the participant’sperspective) – some good, some bad, some in-between (as seen from an observer’sperspective).
This is why I believe that the original phenomenon of power is of a noumenalnature: to have power means to be able – and this comes in different degrees – touse, influence, determine, occupy or even to seal the space of reasons for others.This can happen in a singular event (a powerful speech or a deceit), in a sequenceof events or in a general social situation or structure in which certain social rela-tions are seen as justified, so that a social order comes to be accepted as an orderof justification. Relations and orders of power are relations and orders of justifica-tion, and power arises and persists where justifications arise and persist, where theyare integrated into certain narratives of justification (Forst 2013b). In their light,social relations and institutions, but also certain ways of acting and thinking, appearas legitimate, possibly also as natural or according to God’s will. These can be rela-tions of domination or of equality, political or personal, and the justifications canbe well-founded and collectively shared with good reasons, or they can be distortedand ideological (i.e. justifying a social situation of asymmetry and subordinationwith false reasons that could not be shared among free and equal justificatoryagents in a situation free from such distortion). Such a notion of ideology has nostrong investment in the idea of ‘objective’ or ‘true interests;’ all it implies norma-tively is a right to justification of relations between free and equal persons. So thisis how I explain the Janus-face of power and its inherent relation to reasons andjustifications. Reasoning is essential to any form of power, yet reason in a norma-tive sense remains the capacity to criticize given justifications. Its very nature is totranscend itself.
M. H.: I agree with most, though not all, of what you both have both said, so Iwant to move these ideas forward, rather than critique for the moment. As Amy
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and I converge most, I will direct what I say at Rainer (which is not intended toignore your comments, Amy, rather to build up them).
In the power debates the distinction between power and violence has often beenobserved (for instance, Arendt (1970), Bachrach and Baratz (1962) and Foucault1982, p. 220) but, in my opinion, this opposition has never been adequatelytheorized. Following from what you have just said, Rainer, I think that the key tothis distinction is the difference between compliance that rests upon recognitionand acceptance by B, and compliance which rests upon coercion. In that sense, Ithink the blackmailer example is not the best suited to your purpose, because, evenwhen the compliance is successful due to a credible threat, there is not reasonedacceptance (at least not normatively so) of the outcome by B. A better examplewould be B conceding defeat to A, where B is a party with fewer votes than A,within the context of a long-standing democracy, with a shared stable civic habitus.The losing party B does not want to concede defeat, but does so because it is theonly reasonable course of action relative to their shared local habitus or democraticcivic culture.
Empirically speaking, power which is based upon reasoned acceptance isalways much more successful, effective and stable than coercive power. Therefore,the powerful, who have gained power through coercion, have an intrinsic incentiveto try to convert coercion into power which is recognized and accepted by actorsB. Breaching experiments of the kind done by Garfinkel (1984) and Milgram(2010), where students were asked to interpret everyday requests in unusual ways(Garfinkel), or to request a seat in public transport without the usual reasons(old-age or physical infirmity) (Milgram), show that actors find it deeply traumaticand have strong internal resistance to engaging in what is considered‘unreasonable’ behaviour. In that sense, actors are effectively constrained by reason.Contrary to what Hobbes thought in premising the Leviathan upon coercion,contract based upon shared reason, without coercion, constitutes an effective sourceof power – example below.
Coercion in this context should not only be thought of in terms of physicalthreats, it is theoretically valid to speak of such a thing as symbolic violence. In asituation where entering the local system of power entails subscribing to symbolsand meanings that are either demeaning or alien to the actor’s habitus, we canargue that symbolic violence takes place. The classic instance of this is colonizationin which political structures are introduced which presuppose the internalization ofthe habitus of the colonizer. While these political structures may be reasonable tothe colonizer, the absence of dialogue with the colonized entails that these struc-tures are not reasonable relative to the habitus of actor B, except in a short-termpragmatic sense – uncle Tom, who reproduces hegemonic structures to gain short-term advantage.
Viewed historically, at a meta-level, I think the great distinctions betweengemeinschaft and gesellschaft or, mechanical and organic solidarity, revolve aroundshifts in local language of reason and, therefore, power. Most traditional, orgemeinschaft, forms of social order, presuppose strong reifications, including reli-gious belief, and clear-cut, highly emphatic, distinctions between the sacred andprofane. The distinctions between these categories usually rest upon an essentialistteleological interpretation of the world, where things have an essence within themthat render them sacred. These sacred essences combine together to form an intrin-sic part of the telos, or ultimate end, of the society as a whole. When these
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essences are profaned the social order as a whole is prevented from realizing itsultimate end, thus it becomes imperative for actors to ‘right’ these ‘wrongs’. In thissystem of thought, the law applies differentially according to each actor, relative tostatus essence. Following Durkheim’s account of altruistic suicide (Durkheim 1995[1912]), the highest moral good is the sacrifice of the individual for society. In thisregard, the sacrifice of Jesus for the sake of the sins (profanations) of humanity, inChristianity, and the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son, in all three mono-theistic faiths, are paradigmatic.
From a pragmatic point of view, the combination of making the social ordersacred and the perception of self-sacrifice make instrumental sense. Actors willwillingly, without coercion, sacrifice themselves for the maintenance of the socialorder. They will also consider it reasonable to participate in the sacrifice of thosewho have transgressed, even if they have strong affective emotional ties with thelatter. At its most extreme, following the logic of Abraham, parents will consider itreasonable to sacrifice their own children for the collective good and in cases wheretheir offspring have profaned the sacred, sacrifice of the offending offspring is per-ceived as reasonable – typically, the former entails encouraging sons to die for thecommunity, while the latter involves the sacrifice of daughters who have brought‘dishonor’. The empirical fact that these kinds of sacrifice occur, which must behighly traumatic and entail overcoming huge internal resistance, demonstrates howeffective power/reason can be – contrary to Hobbes above. Thus, local reason cre-ates the conditions of possibility for a relatively stable power structure, which arelegitimate, in the sociological sense of the term.
The forms of gesellschaft power/reason, which render liberal democracies stable,are of relatively recent in origin and involve the congruence of a number ofhistorically contingent events that result in change of habitus. For reasons of space,I can list only a few. In the natural sciences, teleology became suspect. Paradigmaticis the figure of Newton who expressed deep concern that his account of gravityshould not be interpreted as implying some new kind of new essence. Masseducation in the principles of science gradually made an appeal to essencesinherently suspect, even in the social field. Hence, for instance, essentialistarguments for differential power between men and women became unreasonable.Thus, human law slowly becomes neutral with regard to status essence in much thesame way as the physical laws of science with respect to atoms. In the economicfield, profit was no longer the gift of fortuna and privilege, but entailed double-entrybook-keeping, which also mirrored the anonymous, de-essentialized premises of thelaws of natural science. Through the logic of the marketplace, the legitimating prin-ciple of inequality within the modern world became meritocracy, whereby theactions of the individual become absolutely central. In many forms of Protestantismthe belief that the individual stood alone before God gave the individual new sacredstatus. Previously, the three monotheistic faiths had been premised upon salvation asmediated through the community, and its attendant rituals. Bringing these elementstogether, for the first time in history, the individual became elevated above thecollective, which prior to this would have appeared a formula for selfishness,profanation, Godlessness and therefore anarchy. Thus, in place of a system ofthought which elevates sacrifice of the individual for the community as the highestgood, we have a social order that sees its moral foundations along Kantian lineswhereby the individual is always an end in themselves, never a means to an end,and law is neutral. Within this modern ethic the sacrifice of the individual becomes
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entirely unreasonable. Hence, to take a paradigmatic example, to the gesellschaftinterpretative horizon, Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son becomesunreasonable – both God (A who asked for the sacrifice) and Abraham (thecompliant actor B) are unreasonable.
In classical sociological thought (Tönnies, Marx, Durkheim and Weber) it wasassumed that gesellschaft would slowly replace gemeinschaft. However, this is notwhat has happened. Some of the ancient forms of gemeinschaft, in particular thoseassociated with religious belief, have lived on and adapted to new social conditions.Furthermore, new modern forms of secular gemeinschaft have emerged to replacethe old. Nationalism is a form of secular gemeinschaft in the sense that it sets as itshighest moral norm the principle of the sacrifice of the individual for the collective.This is graphically illustrated by Benedict Anderson’s observation that every nationhas a sacred tomb for the unknown soldier (who is really the unknown nationalist),while liberalism has no equivalent tomb for the dead liberal (Anderson 1983,p. 10). Dead nationalists count, while dead liberals do not. In many instances reli-gion and nationalism have been fused, allowing for particularly potent systems ofthought for the purposes of reinforcing power structures. Arguably, in the contextof globalization, where distinctions such as East and West, replace the identifica-tions of nations, the resurgence of fundamentalist variants of Islam and Christianityconstitute such a fusion.
From a sociological empirical point of view both gemeinschaft and gesellschaftsystems of thought reinforce power through legitimacy based upon reason. How-ever, in a conflict between actors from each system of thought, each sees the otheras profaning what they hold to be sacred or right and just, thus the other is consid-ered unreasonable. When one system of thought prevails over the other, those inthe subject position, the actors B, read the imposition of the system of thought assymbolic violence – B feels coerced by an unreasonable A.
It seems to me that the principles of liberalism and human rights are reasonableonly within, broadly speaking, gesellschaft systems of thought. To move from theempirical sociological level to the normative, upholding liberal principles entailsaffirming the reason of a gesellschaft world-view and being-in-the-world over thatof gemeinschaft. This raises the question on what normative grounds can we justifythe imposition of gesellschaft system of thought upon gemeinschaft actors? Is thisnot a form of symbolic violence and, thus, normatively reprehensible?
In presenting the premises of these questions I have deliberately framed thequestions in terms of large-scale interpretative horizons, which it is difficult to stepoutside of, to find a view from nowhere. I have also emphasized the historicallycontingent nature of these interpretative horizons, making transcendental appealsappear prima facie ethnocentric. While these are, of course, ideal types, I think thata conflict between these two systems of thought is the foundation of the deep, asopposed to shallow, conflicts of contemporary global society. I do not present thisas a refutation of what you are saying, Rainer, I am genuinely interested is seeinghow we can resolve this problem, and consider it normatively imperative that weshould be able to do so.
A.A.: I’m sympathetic to the line of thought that Mark has raised with hiscontrast between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft systems of power/reason. As is seeit, this is connected to the (potential) disagreement that Rainer and I have over thestatus of our principles of justification. Rainer says that ‘if we engage in a certaincritical social analysis of such a set of justifications, we have to appeal to certain
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standards of justification that transcend that very context.’ Even granting this point,it seems to me that it remains the case that whatever standards of justification weappeal to in making our critical analysis will themselves be socially and historicallysituated, and thus bound up with relations of power. Acknowledging this doesn’tlead us to endorse a facile relativism though it does, I think, push in the directionof a contextualist, immanent understanding of critique. But as I see it, that’sperfectly fine, because the notion of immanent critique seems sufficient for doingthe kind of critical work we are talking about here. We can draw, for example, onthe notion of freedom as autonomy that emerges out of the historical tradition ofthe Enlightenment and argue that the normative ideal contained within that notionisn’t being realized in current structures or procedures of justification because ofthe ways in which those procedures encode and reinforce ideological or hegemonicrelations of power. This doesn’t require us to hold that this normative standard isitself context transcendent in the sense of transcending the context of late westernmodernity out of which it has arisen. And yet it isn’t a matter of simply replacingone form of justifications with another that is more to our liking; it is a matter ofdrawing on the immanent resources of our historico-philosophical tradition to cri-tique existing standards, conceptions and practices of justification.
As I see it, the issue between Rainer and myself – and this issue is also beingimplicitly raised in Mark’s question about how to make judgments across differentsystems of thought without committing symbolic violence – is not whether we needstandards for critique but rather what we take the status of those standards to be. IfRainer is saying that no critical or normative standard – including the right to justi-fication – can be taken to be context-transcendent in any final sense – because thatway lies metaphysical slumber, as Rainer puts it – then perhaps we are ultimatelyin agreement on that status. But then I would say that this amounts to a contextual-ist understanding of normativity at the meta-ethical level; and, given Rainer’s ownrather different way of conceiving of the relationship between contextualism anduniversalism (Forst 2002, chapter 4), I’m fairly sure that Rainer would not agreewith that way of putting it. Perhaps the difference between us then amounts towhether or not we are willing to see the substantively universal, first-order norma-tive standards and principles upon which we rely as, viewed from the meta-norma-tive perspective, contingently emergent and historically contextual standards thatnevertheless enable us to engage in a robust and reflexive practice of critique.
But I want to focus my remarks on the important issue, also raised by Mark, ofsymbolic violence. It seems to me that this concept, particularly as it is articulatedin the work of thinkers such as Foucault and Bourdieu, raises a significant chal-lenge to the notion of noumenal power that Rainer has sketched out here (andargued for in more detail elsewhere) (Forst 2013b). While I agree with Mark thatpower that is based on reasoned acceptance is more stable and effective than coer-cive power, there is an important dimension of symbolic power that is not capturedat all by his contrast between power based on reasoned acceptance and powerbased on coercion, nor is it, in my view, illuminated by Rainer’s cognitivist con-ception of noumenal power: namely, power rooted in embodied dispositions, affec-tive investments, and unconscious desires. Although I agree that power can andoften does operate through reasons and justifications and that this challenges theo-rists to make sense of the Janus-faced nature of both power and reason, I think weneed to make the further complication that sometimes power does not operatethrough reason at all but rather bypasses the reasoned consent of subaltern actors,
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imprinting itself directly on the body or being internalized in the form of affectiveinvestments or unconscious desires. Precisely because they bypass the reasonedconsent of subordinated subjects, such forms of power are even more subtle, stableand effective than power that rests on reasoned acceptance (Foucault 1980a,1980b). As Rainer insists, power relations that rest on reasoned acceptance canalways – at least in principle – be overturned by rational critique, hence a repeatedand reflexive application of a principle of justification is a sufficient weapon forattacking them. Embodied dispositions, affective investments, and unconsciousdesires, by contrast, are not so easily challenged or transformed by the force of rea-son. Thinking of power as primarily or originally noumenal in nature, as Rainersuggests, leaves us ill-equipped to make sense of these other dimensions or aspectsof symbolic power.
Similarly, although it is no doubt the case that relations of power are connectedin complex and intricate ways to relations and orders of justification, it seems tome to be entirely too strong to say that they are one and the same. To see why thisis the case, it might be helpful to introduce a distinction, familiar from the powertheory literature, between macro-level and micro-level power relations (for a relateddistinction, see Forst 2013c, p. 9). Viewed from the macro-level, it makes perfectsense to say that widespread, systemic power asymmetries – such as more or lessstable structures of social or political oppression – have a certain ‘logic’ to them,that is, that they can be understood in terms of certain aims or purposes, and thatthey need to appear to be rational, legitimate, and justified in order to remain inforce. The subordination of women in the United States and Europe, for example,is connected to certain narratives of justification – narratives about the constraintsof female embodiment or essential femininity, about women’s proper roles as moth-ers, or about the implications of evolutionary biology or of our neurochemicalhard-wiring, or what have you – and these narratives of justification are crucial forunderstanding how women’s subordination is reproduced and maintained over time.
This much seems perfectly plausible. But saying this does not imply the furtherclaim, which Rainer’s notion of noumenal power seems to imply, that the subordi-nation of women operates originally or primarily in and through the reasoning pro-cesses of individual agents. For example, there are certain widespread narrativesthat are commonly taken to justify or at least to explain the fact that so few womenin the United States occupy positions of power, as CEOs of large companies, seniorpartners in established law firms, full professors in the best academic institutions,and so on. These narratives of justification serve as ideological cover for women’songoing economic, political, social and cultural subordination, not only by makingit less likely that women will be chosen for such positions, but also by compellingwomen themselves to opt out of such positions when they are offered, or never tocompete for them in the first place. The situation is very complicated, and has a lotto do with questions of work/family balance and reigning ideologies of mother-hood. But at least one strand of these narratives has to do with a claim aboutwomen’s uneasy relationship to power. On this sort of story, women – because ofevolution, or neurochemistry, or their uteruses, or whatever – are less competitiveand aggressive than men, more collaborative, more nurturing, and more relational;thus, exercising power over others, so the story goes, isn’t really feminine. Hencewomen (‘real’ women, that is) don’t really ‘want’ power (Sellers 2003); or whenthey exercise power, they do so in a fundamentally different, more collaborativeand cooperative way; thus, power over others and a certain hegemonic conception
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of femininity – a conception that is also highly inflected by assumptions aboutclass, race and sexuality – are thought to be incompatible. This kind of story iswidely taken to offer a justificatory narrative for women’s ongoing economic,political and social marginalization in countries where barriers to formal equalityfor women have been torn down – a hegemonic justification that is, to be sure,crying out for critique.
But notice that none of this implies the further claim that for any individualwoman who is faced with the question of whether to accept or how to assume aposition of power within an organization that the demands of normative femininityoperate solely or essentially or even primarily as reasons whose justificatory forcecan be subjected to rational assessment. Of course it may be the case that individ-ual women can rationally assess the justificatory force of this narrative of normativefemininity; but this does not rule out the possibility that the demands of normativefemininity are simultaneously deeply encoded in the bodily dispositions, affectiveinvestments, and unconscious fantasies and desires of those very same women. Forsuch women, violating the demands of normative femininity by appearing too pow-erful or power-hungry may well produce an embodied sense of shame or disrupttheir affective investment in being perceived by their male colleagues as either niceor nurturing or sexually desirable (or at least not sexually undesirable). When awoman’s cheeks burn with shame because a colleague calls her ‘aggressive’ (whichis almost always taken to be a negative trait in a woman, though not in a man) orshe feels uncomfortable with being perceived as too powerful and therefore notnice or nurturing enough then this is the result of the power relations that sustainnormative femininity imprinting themselves directly on the bodies and affectiveinvestments of their targets. That power operates not only through reasons but alsothrough shaping our embodied dispositions and affective investments explains, asFoucault says, why power ‘is so deeply rooted and the difficulty of eluding itsembrace’ (Foucault 1980a, p. 59).
The political upshot of this more complex understanding of power as not onlynoumenal but also embodied and affective is that the oppressed will often not expe-rience their situation as political in the first place and hence will not demand justifi-cation for it (Bourdieu et al. 2000). In such cases, what looks like the acceptanceon the part of the oppressed of their own oppression is actually the result of a bod-ily incorporation of the structural violence of their social world. Such an internali-zation can have deeply depoliticizing effects by producing a sense in the oppressedthat their oppression is inevitable (McNay forthcoming). We need a more complexunderstanding of power, one that understands power as not solely or originally orperhaps even primarily noumenal in nature, in order to account for this phenome-non. Perhaps for this reason we also need an understanding of justice that isn’tbased solely on the right to justification.
So when Rainer says ‘power is what goes on in the head,’ i.e. it is the‘recognition of a reason to act differently than one would have without that reason,’I say, following Foucault and Bourdieu, power is not only what goes on in the head,it is also what goes on in the body, in our bodily dispositions, our affectiveinvestments, and our unconscious fantasies and desires. These dispositions,investments, fantasies and desires may well be connected to recognized and acceptednarratives or orders of justification – in fact, in cases of systemic relations ofdominance and subordination, such as racism, sexism, heteronormativity, andcolonialism, they are probably always connected to some sort of hegemonic
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narratives of justification – but this does not mean that they are inculcated inindividuals through or by means of [i.e. that they ‘rest on’] such justifications oreven that they are recognized by their targets as reasons to act in a certain way. Ifwe want to dismantle and transform those relations of dominance and subordination,we will need to be armed with something more than the force of good reasons; wewill also need some account of how it is possible to transform our embodieddispositions and practices and affective investments and desires. We will have toaccept, I would say, that there are aspects of social life where reason does not haveas much force as we might like to think it does. At the same time, if we agree, asMark has suggested above, that our conceptions of reason and systems of thoughtare always bound up with relations of power such that our moral and politicaljudgments can mask relationships of symbolic violence, then we ought to besuspicious of the very idea of the unforced force of the better argument (Allen2012). Reason always has a force, in the sense that it is always intertwined withrelations of power; and yet there are also aspects of our lives in which reason maynot have as much force as philosophers would like to think.
R.F.: It seems that our trialogue has moved from an initial agreement to sub-stantive disagreement at more foundational levels and that, I think, is for the better.For it brings out important philosophical issues underlying sociological analyses ofpower. I am therefore happy to respond to Mark’s charge of committing symbolicviolence in imposing a Gesellschaft system of ideas on Gemeinschaft actors byreturning the charge: I think characterizing contemporary social forms in that dual-istic way is inadequate and potentially reifies cultural and social identities and, mostof all, leaves no room for internal dissent and radical critique from within so-calledGemeinschaft societies. Thus it is sociologically and normatively problematic, pos-sibly itself a case of symbolic violence and of ethnocentrism, to reserve certain nor-mative notions of emancipation only for ‘modern’ societies. I am also glad to replysimilarly to Amy’s charge of being a hypercognitivist about reasons and power andignoring the effects power has on human bodies. I think that the super-Cartesianhere is not me but Amy, as she thinks that there is a categorial difference betweenthe way beliefs are formed and the way bodies are formed, while I think that bothare different aspects of the same process, which Foucault described as the effectsof ‘truth regimes.’ Amy is also more Cartesian than me in thinking that whenever Idescribe a process as one of reasons and reasoning, purified reason and reflexivityor ‘reasoned consent’ are somehow at work – which is not what I say: there arereasons and reasoning, yet reason is the faculty of critically reflecting on certainreasons and forms of reasoning which might turn out to be unreasonable (i.e.reflexively unjustifiable). Ideology is an example for a cluster of beliefs acceptedon the basis of bad reasons, forming complexes of justification that colonize andfixate the noumenal realm of justifications and thus shield these justifications fromreflexive scrutiny. So we must enlarge our idea of the noumenal to include bad jus-tifications, but they are nevertheless justifications for those who hold and followthem. That is quite a mouthful, so let me briefly explain.
I agree with Mark about the importance of drawing a distinction between powerand violence, yet I also think that the distinction between violence and coercion isimportant. Unlike violence, which tries to eliminate the possibility of an alternativeof at least two kinds of reaction on the side of the attacked person, coercion stillworks upon a free agent insofar as there are at least the two options of complianceand non-compliance left. So in the blackmailing case, there is of course no
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normatively demanding and sufficient form of acceptance possible, yet there is stillacceptance and recognition of a reason to act in a certain way – a reason one couldreject, though at a high price. That is why I think that a blackmailing situation is dif-ferent from one where violence is exercised and where the victim is a pure object ofanother’s action. I think we need more fine-grained distinctions as to the differentqualities of ‘recognition and acceptance’ of reasons, not an either-or. Given that, Ithink the notion of ‘symbolic violence’ is only appropriate where the dominatingand hegemonic set of meanings and beliefs completely colonizes the mind of othersand the internalization is very strong.
Tönnies’s old distinction (used by Mark) between Gemeinschaft and Gesell-schaft continues to be heuristically useful, yet only as ideal types, and there aremany ways to describe the change of normative orders from one to the other (oneof which I suggested in my toleration book, Forst 2013a). I think Mark is right topoint out that classical modernization theory needs to be rethought today, but verymuch along these lines I would also say that in the contemporary world we findmany different societies following very different paths of modernization that leadrather to ‘multiple modernities’ (Eisenstadt) than to polar forms of social order tobe described using the G-G-dualism. So I see the point about the development of a‘modern ethic’ that Mark thinks separates the two orders, given Western history,but I think we need a different structural story about such an ethic – one thatunderstands the historical dynamic of social change and emancipation in terms thatdo not reserve such a dynamic to Western societies with a Christian background.
As much as I agree with Mark’s brief reconstruction of the aspects of Westernmodernization, I think we need to stress the social conflicts that were driving theseprocesses. These were conflicts in which a given normative order was challengedto provide better and new justifications for certain norms and structures, as thedominant metaphysical or religious or feudal or patriarchal or monarchist (or com-binations thereof) narratives of justification were no longer seen as acceptable. Thusthose who dissented claimed first of all a right to justification for themselves – theright to demand proper justifications that could withstand rational scrutiny (i.e. whatwas seen as rational scrutiny given new developments in science and morality).Those critics thus spoke a new language – such as when the Levellers redefinedpolitical rule as requiring a contract between free and equal persons in order to belegitimate – a radically new language at odds with most of the dominant norms. Intheir eyes, these ‘unreasonable’ (from a conventional perspective) claims were themost reasonable; thus there was a conflict between different forms of thinkingabout reasonable justification. So are we now, as observers of this history but alsoas distant parts of it, and thus still participants, to say that these were purely ‘con-tingent’ developments and that – as I take Amy and Mark to argue – the radicalclaims of these dissenters could only be called ‘reasonable’ after they had achieveda turn in history in their direction? That strikes me as problematic – for that couldamount to a form of neo-Hegelian Darwinism in which those victorious in historyare given the power to define normative truth and reasonableness (and it is, just asan aside, a serious question who actually dominated Western history). I take this tobe an historical and a normative mistake: historical, since then we cannot under-stand the force of the radical claims of these critics as they understood it and as itled to radical change in the first place, thus cutting off the participant’s perspectivecompletely; and normative, as we would have to say to those who protested then(as well as today) against patriarchy and authoritarianism that we first have to await
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the verdict of history before we can say anything about the justification of theirclaims. But with Benjamin I think that we must not leave the authority to definethe truth of emancipatory claims to the historically victorious. We need to take astance, as we are (still) part of these social struggles.
As such participants, I do not think we have the metaphysical luxury ofinhabiting a divine standpoint from which we could call those historical develop-ments either ‘contingent’ or ‘necessary’. I find both stances mysteriously ahistorical,searching for an outer-worldly position sub specie aeternitatis, which we cannothave. Rather, we need to understand that to think historically is to try to reconstructthe normative force of emancipatory claims, such as the right to justification, invarious social contexts. In other words, when radical critics like Pierre Bayle (seeForst 2013a, § 18) denied current religious worldviews and argued for a morality ofreciprocity and universality free from religious grounding, he was not ‘imposing’ aforeign language on the traditional society of his time; rather, he was pointing to thereflexive truth that norms that claim to be universally and reciprocally valid have to‘earn’ their validity through arguments heeding these criteria. He was trulyinnovative by pointing to that reflexive truth and he arrived at it aided by a numberof developments in the space of reasons during his time, but when he wrote, thatspace had not been changed in its hegemonic form. Thus, we deny such radicalcritics their validity when we say that only after they were successful, could theyhave been right. That is Darwinism about reasons.
Likewise, it is a mistake to think that when someone or a group in a contempo-rary society – which Mark would categorize as a Gemeinschaft – raises a radicalfeminist or democratic or socialist demand, he or she is ‘imposing’ a Gesellschaftview on her or his society. There have indeed been many past and present coloniz-ing impositions from the outside, yet internal critique that reclaims the right to jus-tification as the core of whatever is claimed concretely cannot be counted as such acolonization. We would expatriate those internal critics if we did so. And we wouldfall prey to an ethnocentric view that homogenizes non-Western societies as frame-works in which no radical critique asking for new and better reasons were eitherpossible or legitimate. We would also ignore ‘our’ own history of radical critique,which was greeted with the same attitude of being ‘strange’, ‘foreign’ or ‘unreason-able.’ The ethnocentrism and symbolic violence (if any) thus does not lie in makingcontext-transcending appeals to a right to be treated as a justificatory equal, but insealing off normative social orders according to geographic or temporal lines.
Based on that view, I agree with Amy’s stress on the importance of internal orimmanent critique, as no social critic, no matter how radical, is not also an ‘imma-nent critic.’ But again, why can someone in a non-Western society not claim to berespected as an equal even if her or his society hardly has any such notion as partof its ‘historical tradition’? Must critics have national-traditional passports of plausi-ble historically embedded criticism? And did the ones in ‘our’ tradition have suchpassports? And if we are ‘immanent’ critics today and want to argue for socialchange, what are the criteria by which we choose which norms of ‘our’ traditionwe should appeal to, given that it might be (as all of us agree) so heavily markedby norms of nationalism, ethnocentrism, patriarchy, homophobia etc.? ‘Immanence’is not a sufficient criterion for normative social criticism; yet otherworldly transcen-dence or pure reason is not available either. Thus, only reason – constantly reflect-ing on what counts as ‘reasonable’ and whether that is deserved – can provide a(fallible) solution here. That is a notion of reason that defies the dualisms between
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‘contextualist’ vs. ‘transcendental’ or ‘historical’ vs. ‘ahistorical’. It is the best wehave, finite creatures as we are, yet reflexive ones.
Amy is rightly worried whether a notion of ‘noumenal power’ has the tools tounderstand ‘power rooted in embodied dispositions, affective investments, andunconscious desires’ I think it does, but for that we need to free ourselves from anoverly ‘pure’ idea of the noumenal. In my use of the term, it stands for the realmof justifications generally, descriptively speaking, thus also harboring false, one-sided or ideological justifications. The noumenal is far from identical with therealm of justifications based on ‘reasoned acceptance’ as Mark and Amy believe.So the real question between us is how we should understand the kind of powerthat leads to the ‘embodied’ effects Amy has in mind and that she analyses in herown work on the subject-forming aspects of power (Allen 1999, 2008).
I am not sure, however, how deep our disagreement here actually is. For givenmy extended notion of the noumenal, I agree with Amy that narratives ofjustification have the effect of colonizing the mind and self-awareness ofsubordinated subjects – in her example women who participate in the reproductioncertain stereotypes about themselves and their proper social roles. I don’t see whywe should not say that such a form of mind colonization is a sealing off of thespace of reasons for such women, who cannot ‘think’ of behaving differently andthus would ‘feel’ awkward if they did. Already these interchangeable wordingsshow that we should not construct an artificial boundary here between the cognitiveand the emotional, for in the end we talk about a self-image or a self-understandingthat has been ‘produced’ by webs of beliefs and discourses as well as by a‘discipline’ of socialization. Yet as we can learn from Foucault, such disciplineworks through a discursive nexus of truth and power and I do not see the point ofgiving that nexus a non-cognitivist reading. What would the Foucauldianvocabulary of ‘truth regimes’, ‘discourse’, etc. mean otherwise: ‘We are subjectedto the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power exceptthrough the production of truth.’ (Foucault 1980c, p. 93). And that is a truth aboutourselves, including a truth about our bodies, guided by schemes separating the‘normal’ from the ‘abnormal’ or using other binary codes. The effect of that is acertain ‘body awareness’ as well as certain ‘views’ or ‘feelings’ about ourselves,but I am not sure whether these are located in different parts of our brains or,seriously speaking, in different compartments called ‘beliefs’, ‘reasons’ or‘emotions’ or ‘head’ vs. ‘body’ (p. 22). In short, what I am saying is that I don’tbelieve in ‘bodies’ as separate non-cognitive entities relevant in this context.
Thus, I am also not sure what it means to say that normative notions of femi-ninity imprint themselves ‘directly’ (p. 21) onto bodies. I would say that discursivepower shapes our minds and beliefs as much as our bodies and our awareness ofthem, and the point of seeing the effects of power is precisely to see not just howthese aspects are intertwined but that they are one and the same effect. We have toovercome Cartesian dualism, even if it is reproduced in Freudian terms. How else– and I think I agree with Amy’s final statements here – could we understand thepower of racism, sexism, heteronormativity, etc. if not through the complex under-standing of what it means to internalize not just norms of behavior and self-images,but also beliefs about ourselves and why it is right to think or feel in certain ways?And how, if that connection between reasons, beliefs, narratives and emotions werenot in place, could genealogical critique – which reconstructs and lays open thiscomplex – ever hope to be successful? I mean of course the critique we find in
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Amy’s works – highly refined, rational and powerful as it is. It doesn’t sound tome like a program of mere ‘re-education,’ rather like one of reflexive criticismwhich at least hopes to find a foothold in the capacities of social agents to reflecton themselves – their beliefs and their feelings as well as how they were formed.
M.H.: I do not think much separates us. Just to clarify, by noumenal power youmean the core process whereby actor A gets B to do something that they wouldnot otherwise do, which takes place through a process whereby B finds themselvesconstrained by shared reasoning. In this situation it is possible that B could be‘unreasonable’, but this would entail a high cost for B. As I argued earlier, withregard to the breaching experiments, most actors are constrained by local conditionsof reasonableness. Building upon that, we would agree that third and fourth dimen-sions of power are instances where this mechanism of noumenal reasonable con-straint is used in a deceitful way – for instance, by appealing to tacitly held beliefsthat are not properly interrogated, the strategic use of truth claims to reify conven-tional practices, or the creation of subject positions that predispose actors into con-sidering domination reasonable or desirable – Amy’s point above. These processesexploit the mechanisms of noumenal power for the purposes of domination.
With our critical focus upon the third and fourth dimensions of power, we mustnot forget, as the followers of Foucault tend to, that the reinforcement of domina-tion through noumenal power is parasitic upon a belief in reasonable justice thatcannot be wrong all of the time. Some of the time, A prevails over B because it isactually reasonable for B to comply, as measured relative to justice and the longerterm interests of B. An obvious instance where reason and justice are synchronicwould be when B find themselves prevailed upon in a free and fair election – it isreasonable in every way for B to concede defeat when they have fewer votes thanA. Even though B is defeated, it is still in B’s longer-term interests that the struc-tures of the democratic process are reproduced, which is also just. As I have arguedelsewhere (2012 and forthcoming), the episodic interest of B in winning that partic-ular election are of a lesser order than the dispositional interests that B has in thestructured reproduction of what is a reasonable system. I hope this is an accuratecoming together of my and your theoretical positions, Rainer?
I think where the disagreement with you comes in (for both myself and Amy)can be explained by the theorization of three levels of noumenal conflict.
The first level, which is the least problematic, is where A and B share a systemof meaning and deep moral foundations. Even with deeply conflicting goals, socialreproduction has the potential (once three and four dimensional power are exposed)to work perfectly. Actor A should be able to use reason relatively unproblematical-ly to prevail over B, as compliance by B is actually reasonable for B, as measuredagainst B’s longer-term dispositional interests. In such a society the structures ofthe system, while perhaps not perfectly egalitarian, are in the interests of the worstoff, as measured relative to any realistic (not utopian) alternatives.
The next level is where there is a conflict over meaning. This is more problem-atic as there is no transcendental court of appeal for the meaning of signifiers. Weare dealing with different language games (Wittgenstein) or systems of thought(Foucault). However, a shared mutually endorsed noumenal power outcome is pos-sible as long as the actors follow Habermasian principles of being open to themeanings of other. This remains a middle level conflict, as long as there are sharednorms. The current controversies in Europe over the wearing of the niqab are ofthis level. The critique by contextualist multiculturalists of the liberal position is
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usually along the lines that liberals assume that the niqab is a symbol of oppression(see, for instance, Allison 2011, pp. 686–88, Cochoran 2013). However, typically,the critique then goes on to argue that in complex modern liberal societies womenwear the niqab as an expression of identity that empowers them. The multiculturalargument does not entail that we should respect patriarchal domination of women.In this dispute what divides the multicultural contextualist from their supposed lib-eral adversaries is the attributed meaning of niqab. Both would appear to agree thatthe woman’s right to choose, her autonomy, should be respected. Thus, norma-tively, this form of contextualist multiculturalism is actually liberal – despite con-textualist claims to radicalism. Similarly, Foucault’s critique represents a middlelevel conflict, rather than anything more radical. He is alerting us to the fact thatother may have a different interpretative horizon and he makes us aware that theconstitution of our subject positions may entail internalizing dispositions that areinimical to our autonomy – as in Amy’s examples above. Yet, Foucault is stillupholding fundamentally liberal principles by assuming that autonomy is norma-tively desirable.
Foucault once described the disagreement between Marx and the bourgeoiseconomists as a storm in a child’s paddling pool (1970, p. 262). I would say theconflict between his level of contextualism and that of liberals, while not a stormin a child’s paddling pool (level one conflict), is a storm in a lake, not an oceanstorm, which is level three conflict.
A level three conflict takes place when noumenal power does not bind becauseboth the systems of meaning and fundamental norms are in conflict. To return tomy ideal type resurrection of the distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft,there is a fundamental difference between a system of morality that presupposesthat normative rightness is to be found with reference to the higher ideals of thecommunity and normative principles that start from the individual. To adapt Taylor(1989), part of gesellschaft reasoning entails adherence to the significance, almostsacredness (in Alexander’s civil sense 2003), of the ordinary life, which is summa-rized by the Kantian idea that individuals are always ends in themselves, never ameans to an end. Parenthetically, I diverge from Taylor in that I do not think thisidea is uniquely modern or Western.
In a strongly normatively bound gemeinschaft the highest good entails the will-ingness to sacrifice the self for the community, which is considered freedom. Asdescribed in Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life, the person is onlywhole to the extent to which they realize themselves through the community. Godis, of course, the ultimate representation of the community. Upon death the virtuousbecome part of God, the essence of the community, thus free. The flip side of thisis, unfortunately, that those who stand out against the community must be cast outfrom it. This usually takes place through ostracism, which exists on a scale from notspeaking to the subject, to physical expulsion and, ultimately, physical annihilation.
To take a specific instance, recently, in northern India a young couple werekilled and burned alongside each other on a funeral pyre for the crime of falling inlove and attempting to by-pass the traditional route of arranged marriage. When thejournalist went to interview the families there was no feeling of remorse. The kill-ings were justified with statements like: ‘… whatever God wanted, happened …’‘What was done to them was the right thing to do. We had to set an example.’‘Our culture is not like you have in the city. Here our women live behind curtains…’ ‘The village doesn’t approve of love affairs here.’ (BBC 2013). These
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responses do not make sense relative to a liberal moral world-view but, unfortu-nately, they do relative to a gemeinschaft one. In interpreting this we have takeseriously that for these families the killing of their own offspring must haveentailed overcoming massive internal resistance. Yet, their sense of honour, tied tocommunity, compelled them to do it. It is an instance of noumenal power at itsmost extreme, with deep resistance, yet compelling. Our difference from thesesocial actors is not simply about meaning: it entails moral foundations.
In the case of deep conflict, prevailing over the other entails either or both sym-bolic and physical violence because there is no shared reason to mutually constrainthe interaction. Honour killings are outlawed in India and, presumably, the coercionattached to this, including long prison sentences, is somewhat effective in deterringthem. Maybe, over time, there is a feedback from law to habitus, so these viewsbecome questioned. However, the point remains that this form of deep conflict istheoretically possible.
I have two responses to deep conflict. On the one hand it seems to me intui-tively obvious that the gemeinschaft moral system constitutes a form of alienation,which can be unmasked, thus subject to noumenal power. However, my deep downsociological sense tells me that this view is naive. Hence, my more consideredresponse is that we have to be honest enough to admit to symbolic violence on ourown part. It only seems reasonable to me that political institutions are for individu-als, not the other way around. However, if someone else has been socialized intobelieving that individuals exist for the greater glory of the Community, accordingto some divine plan, or secular prophet (such as Chairman Mao), I have to admit,to paraphrase Wittgenstein, my spade is turned. However, acknowledging this, I amwilling to defend the rights of the inevitable minority within that other communitywho wish to live their lives for themselves, to live autonomously and, for instance,to fall in love and marry with whom they chose. That is, even if such a defenceentails acknowledging symbolic violence against the deeply felt moral commit-ments of that community.
As a qualification upon the above I have presented gemeinschaft purelynegatively and gesellschaft positively. This is not correct, as both have positive andnegative aspects. However, for reasons of clarity within limited space, I have chosenone particular aspect of each. The focus here is noumenal power and its limits, not afull characterization of the strengths and weaknesses of gemeinschaft andgesellschaft.
A.A.: I’m inclined to agree with Rainer that our discussion has moved to sub-stantive disagreement at more foundational levels, and that this is a good thing,too. In my closing remarks, I would like to briefly sketch out what I take to be thefundamental points of disagreement between Rainer and myself; in the end, I willreturn briefly to Rainer’s exchange with Mark.
Let me start, briefly, with the issue of metaphysics, which Rainer raised implic-itly by calling me a super-Cartesian. This is an interesting point, vividly expressed,but it does not describe my position. I have made no claims about the metaphysicalstatus of either ‘bodies’ or ‘minds’ or the categorial differences between them. If Iwere forced to articulate a metaphysical position with respect to power, I wouldincline toward nominalism, of the sort expressed by Foucault when he wrote:‘power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength weare endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situa-tion in a particular society’ (Foucault 1978, p. 93).
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I begin with the charge of Cartesianism because, I think, this disagreement pointsto a fundamental methodological difference between Rainer and myself. In my view,the goal of an analysis of power is not the Platonic aim of producing a theory ofpower that correctly discerns the essence of the concept. This is an ambition that, itseems to me, is expressed in Rainer’s talk of ‘the real phenomenon of power’ (Forst2013c, p. 1) and ‘the original phenomenon of power’ (Forst 2013c, p. 5). Rather, as Isee it, the goal is to develop a conceptualization of power that can serve as the basisfor specific forms of social criticism in the historical present. Such aconceptualization must be, as Foucault said, ‘ongoing,’ which is to say that it must bechecked against the historical conditions that motivate it and the empirical reality thatit aims to illuminate (Foucault 1982, p. 209). That is the spirit in which I have offeredsome criticisms of Rainer’s conception of noumenal power – not with the aim ofoffering a competing theory of the essence of power but rather with the aim of assess-ing his proposed conceptualization of power against our current historical circum-stances and the empirical realities that the analysis of power aims to illuminate.
Second, let me return to the relationship between power and the body, startingwith an interpretive point: one of the major lines of argument in Foucault’s Disci-pline and Punish is that modern, disciplinary power imprints itself directly on thebody, and that what we call the ‘soul’ is actually the effect of that process. This isthe central argument of the opening chapter, ‘The Body of the Condemned,’ thepenultimate paragraph of which ends with the following lines, which effect a stun-ning inversion of the Platonic dictum that the body is the prison of the soul:
The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself theeffect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him andbrings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercisesover the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul isthe prison of the body’. (Foucault 1979, p. 30)
This is just to say that whatever one thinks in the end about the claim that poweris solely or originally noumenal, Foucault’s analysis of power is more at odds withRainer’s cognitivist account than he seems to realize (see Forst 2013c, pp. 8–9).
Of course, the more important issue here is not really who has got Foucault rightbut rather whether thinking of power as imprinting itself directly on the body is auseful or fruitful way to think about power. In this connection, it is perhaps worthnoting that the idea that disciplinary power imprints itself directly on the body hasproved enormously productive for feminist theory, as is amply demonstrated bySandra Bartky’s classic analysis of what she calls the disciplinary practices throughwhich normative femininity is imprinted on female bodies, practices which includedieting, exercise, regimentation of bodily gestures, postures, and comportment, andornamentation (Bartky 1990). Other groundbreaking work in this vein includes thatof Bordo (2003), Heyes (2007) and Young (1990). This at least suggests that thenotion of disciplinary power imprinting itself directly on the body has proven apowerful theoretical tool for feminist theory. Moreover, it is not clear that Rainer’salternative noumenal account of power is able make sense of this phenomenon in theway that he supposes. If power is defined as justificatory power, then it must alwaysoperate within the space of reasons; whatever embodied or affective or unconsciousforces serve to close off the space of reasons for certain individuals or oppressedgroups are, ex hypothesi, operating outside of the space of reasons, precisely insofar
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as they constitute that very space. I think that critical theorists absolutely need such aconception of power (see Saar 2011), but unlike Rainer, I don’t see how such aconception could be a noumenal one, even in his more expansive sense of this term.
The relationship between power and the body is also crucially, though perhapsless obviously, important for thinking about the role that social movements play insocial and political transformation. Social movements engage in embodied politicalpractices such as sit-ins, public protests, demonstrations, marches, occupations, actsof civil disobedience, and even hunger strikes. Such forms of social and politicalaction are not, I think, well-illuminated by an account of political power that concep-tualizes these practices in terms of a kind of reason-giving or justificatory power.Rather, as the great theorist and practitioner of non-violent social protest, Dr MartinLuther King, noted in one of his most famous writings (1963), direct action involvespresenting ‘our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience ofthe local and the national community.’1 However, despite King’s talk here of anappeal to the conscience of the community, direct action is not understood primarilyas the giving of a reason; rather, the ‘very purpose of direct action’ is to force one’spolitical opponents to negotiate: ‘Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a cri-sis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to nego-tiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can nolonger be ignored.’ What makes this kind of oppositional, non-reason-oriented stancenecessary is the very nature of the injustice and domination that civil rights activistswere fighting against. As King notes, ‘we have not made a single gain in civil rightswithout determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical factthat privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily … freedom isnever voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.’Creating this sort of pressure in the context of the civil rights struggle required indi-viduals to put their bodies on the line, to subject themselves to the jeers of hostilecrowds, to violent treatment at the hands of police, and to arrest for having violatedunjust laws. A theory of power that understands power in strictly noumenal terms isnot well suited to make sense of this type of embodied, oppositional political protest,which as the history of the civil rights movement in the United States shows, hasformed an important part of emancipatory social change.
To these examples, I imagine Rainer would respond that, on his view, reasons areactually doing the work in these examples just cited. Women shape their bodiesaccording to the dictates of normative femininity, if they do so, only if they take thedemands of normative femininity as reasons for behaving in certain ways, and thewhite community in the US south in the early 1960s only negotiated with civil rightsprotestors because they perceived the unrest created by their protests as a reason foracting. This takes us back to Mark’s earlier distinction between compliance that restsupon recognition and acceptance of a reason and compliance that rests on coercion.Rainer’s response to this distinction was to say that he is using the term ‘reasons’ in apurely descriptive sense that can encompass bad or ideological justifications, and thusis not limited to a strongly normative notion of reasoned acceptance. I confess that Iam very worried that this way of thinking about power, when applied to situations ofoppression, tends toward the old cliché that ‘no one can oppress you without yourpermission,’ a view that puts too much responsibility on the victims of dominationand not enough on those who are doing the dominating. I also worry that thisresponse rests on a conflation between explanatory reasons – i.e. reasons understoodin a purely descriptive, non-normative sense, as causes for certain kinds of actions
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that may or may not be recognized as such by the actors – and justificatory or norma-tive reasons – i.e. reasons that count (or, since Rainer insists that there can be good orbad justifications, at least seem to count) in favor of certain actions. To be clear, Isuspect that Rainer’s view is that, when it comes to human actions, there are only jus-tificatory or normative reasons – that is, there are either good reasons or pro tanto rea-sons, but both of these are at least candidates for justification, and hence arenormative reasons in that sense – and that it makes no sense to talk about what I havecalled here explanatory reasons. Be that as it may, it seems to me that some of the ini-tial plausibility of his conception of noumenal power rests on the fact that prettymuch anything can serve as an explanatory reason, hence it is intuitively plausible tosay things like ‘the reason that he left 1 million dollars in a suitcase in the park is thathe was being blackmailed’ or ‘the reason that she is constantly on a diet is that she isunder the sway of normative femininity’ or ‘the reason that they took down the signsthat said “Whites Only” is that they feared the unrest caused by the civil rights pro-tests.’ But from this it does not follow that blackmail or normative femininity or evencivil rights protests function as reasons in the justificatory or normative sense (even ifwe grant that at least the first two are bad or ideological versions of such types of rea-sons) that rest on perceived, recognized and accepted justifications (again, even ifthose justifications are false or one-sided in some way). There can be good and badjustificatory reasons but there can also be forms of power that cause others to act incertain ways but that do so without working through the rational acceptance or recog-nition – whether that acceptance is well-justified or not– of those actors.
Finally, I cannot resist a short response to Rainer and Mark’s debate about the rela-tionship between power and claims about historical progress (or regress). I agree withMark’s point that in cases of what he calls deep conflict, we may well reach a pointwhere our spade is turned. I would just like to go beyond this to make two quick, fur-ther points, both of which would require much more extensive argument to vindicate.First, even if we grant that Rainer’s worry about Darwinism applied to reasons is aserious one, it seems to me that his view is open to an equally serious worry, namelythat it commits us to saying that throughout most of the history of the world, mostpeople have been morally wrong, or at least morally worse than ‘us’, i.e. those whohave recognized the emancipatory force of the right to justification. This is a versionof what Pauline Kleingeld calls the ‘moral equality’ problem in Kant’s practical phi-losophy (1999); unlike Kleingeld and, I suspect, Rainer, I think we should be a bitmore sanguine about biting this particular bullet, since doing so smacks of a moralhubris of which we should be wary. Second, I take issue with Rainer’s claim that ‘tothink historically is to try to reconstruct the normative force of emancipatory claimssuch as the right to justification’. Certainly this is one mode of historical thinking, butit is far from the only one – one can also view history as a story of decline and fall oras a series of discrete epochs that are punctuated by discontinuous breaks – nor is itobvious that this mode of historical thinking is best suited to a critical theory that aimsto put the issue of domination or injustice at its center, as I think Rainer and I bothaim to do. A more promising mode, in my view, would be one that enables us not totake a stance on normative conflicts in the past – I’m really not sure what we gain bythis – but rather to understand our own, present-day, taken-for-granted normativeassumptions differently. A history, that is, not of the past, but of the present, wherethe aim is not to vindicate our own perspective but rather to problematize it.
R.F.: It has been a privilege to have this discussion with two of the mostimportant theorists of power of our time, so I should not use the additional
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privilege of having a last word to open up further issues between us. Rather, I shallbriefly respond with respect to what I regard as the most important points we havefocused on.
I readily admit that the term ‘noumenal power’ may lead to misunderstandings,so let me reiterate that it does not mean, as Mark and Amy seem to imply, onlyforms of power that are based on ‘shared reasoning’ as a form of ‘reasonedacceptance’ in a reflexive mode. Its meaning is broader than that, as it also refersto ideological or disciplinary discursive forms of thought. Noumenal power worksthrough justifications (good or bad) taken over by those subjected to it, and thereare many modes of this acceptance, some reflexive and some not.
Still, I agree with Mark that for any form of power to operate, a commonframework of meanings that makes communication possible is necessary – at leastcommon to the extent that A knows what B means by using certain expressions,even if never using them oneself (like words referring to slaves, e.g.). But that is aweaker requirement than a notion of ‘reasonable justice’ as Mark presupposes.Implicitly, however, any structure of communication and justification, as asymmetri-cal as it might be, does not just rest on local modes of justification and on whatcounts as ‘reasonable’ but also harbors the (noumenal) possibility that a justification(or way of justifying social relations) is reflexively questioned with respect to thevalidity claim that is being raised. When this happens, a more radical principle isused than merely a local one – in its most radical form, it is the principle that anorm can only claim reciprocal and general validity if it has been arrived atthrough a discourse guided by the criteria of reciprocity and generality. This is aprinciple both immanent to and transcending practices of justification, and it is insocial struggles over justifications that this reflexive principle comes to the fore.
From that angle, I very much appreciate the distinction between three levels ofsocial conflict that Mark suggests. They require social agents to reach higher levelsof reflexivity as given justifications are being challenged. In conflicts over goals, ashared normative order secures agreement despite disagreement. In conflicts overmeanings, certain aspects of such a normative order need to be reconsidered andreconstructed while others remain in place. Things are different with respect towhat Mark considers to be a conflict between fundamentally different normativeorders of a Gesellschaft vs. Gemeinschaft type. In the example that Mark gives, wefind a traditional order of justification with a thick form of noumenal power thatcan even motivate families to sacrifice some of their members for reasons of socialhonor and communal Sittlichkeit. I agree with Mark that there is a fundamentalmoral difference involved in such a conflict, though I am not sure why oppositionto such a form of Sittlichkeit by, for example, those who dissent from it or thosewho are solidary with these dissenters, constitutes ‘symbolic violence,’ as Markargues. For those dissenters, the hegemonic form of the traditional normative orderhas lost most of its noumenal power, but that does not mean that their oppositionto the violence done to them is itself violent, as they claim and use a right to ques-tion the dominant justifications as subjects who deny the validity claims of the tra-ditional order over them – so yes, it is a radical power challenge and conflict, butno, the dissenters thereby resist the symbolic (or real) violence of an order whichdenies their justificatory standing while at the same time claiming authority overthem. They do not equally subject others to such violence – though they may beforced to defend themselves with violence – as they only ask to be taken seriouslyas justificatory subjects and not to be overpowered and dominated. They resist
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domination but do not themselves dominate. And they do not necessarily use analternative Gesellschaft frame for their critique; rather, they draw out a radicalconsequence from within a normative order that claims validity over them.
I am grateful to Amy Allen for pressing me hard on fundamental issues con-cerning an analysis of power. And while I tried to identify a thorough Cartesianismin her thought, she accuses me of Platonism, searching for the ‘essence’ of the con-cept of power. Now I readily admit that I am interested in the essence, i.e. truemeaning, of that concept as far as finite beings can determine it, but I do not seewhy that commits me to Platonism, as I make no metaphysical claim about such anessence as existing as a timeless idea.
As far as Foucault’s history of power as a nexus between truth and power is con-cerned, I still have trouble understanding how a ‘soul’ could imprison the ‘body’ inthe way Foucault analyses it if one disregards the noumenal structures of disciplinarypower that define what a ‘soul’ is (in Christian thinking especially) and what itmeans to have one and avoid a ‘sinful’ life – as a discipline of mind and body at thesame time. That seems to me a clear case of noumenal, discursive power producingcertain subjects and their bodies. The same holds true for the normative productionof feminine bodies through discursive power, I think. How such power could‘directly’ imprint itself on the body, as Amy argues, I don’t see, I admit. Why wouldyou call that form of power ‘discursive’ then? The space of reasons, as I understandit, is broad, and it includes such disciplinary discourses that seal off alternative waysof thinking and feeling – ways that Foucault’s genealogy tried to open up, by con-structing discursive counter-power. There is no discursive power operating ‘outside’(p. 39) of the space of justifications which regulates ourselves. If there were, it wouldbe sealed off from genealogical critique. In the words of a power theorist I followhere (including the point about domination):
The subject, as Foucault conceives it, is constituted by forces that can be analyzedempirically in the sense that the discursive and sociocultural conditions of possibilityfor subjectivity in a given historically specific location can be uncovered through ananalysis of power/knowledge regimes. But the subject has always to take up thoseconditions, and it is in the taking up of them that they can (potentially) be trans-formed. An episteme, a set of rules for discourse formations, or a power/knowledgeregime sets the limits within which I can think, deliberate about ends, and act, but itdoes not prescribe the specific content of any particular thought or of any particularaction (except perhaps in the most extreme cases of domination). (Allen 2008, p. 37f)
Based on such a view, I fear I must disagree with Amy’s interpretation of ‘embod-ied political practices.’ Challenges to hegemonic forms of power can take manyforms, and interventions into the social space of justifications can of course be non-linguistic, such as a silent sit-in or a hunger strike. We need to distinguish the modeof opposing domination from the reason for opposing it and the claims thus raised– in Martin Luther King’s terms (cited by Amy) as claims to the public ‘con-science.’ Clearly that protest was meant to expose the lack of justification of thedominant forms of power and the social structures they supported. To ‘dramatize’an issue that must not be ‘ignored,’ as King says, is exactly what can be necessaryto attain justificatory standing and no longer be denied one’s right to justification.Using such means unmasks the unreason of the other side, hence it is not, as Amysays, ‘non-reason oriented’, as it has all (good) reason(s) on its side (and knowsthat) and just makes the unreason of the other side obvious.
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I am not sure I really differ from Amy in thinking that we need to make an effortto try to understand how noumenal power works such that we inquire into the motiva-tional and cognitive ‘economy’ of subjects of oppression and coercion. It seems tome far too simple to think that the oppressed either willingly ‘accept’ their situation(even in a way that they could be blamed for such acceptance, as Amy suggests to bean implication of my view) or are purely causally directed by alien forces they are notaware of (Amy’s notion of ‘explanatory reasons’). I think both extremes are unhelp-ful; to understand how discursive power constitutes and frames self-knowledge andself-evaluations in no way implies that those who adopt such views are to be blamedfor that, nor does it imply that there are anonymous forces at work here that telecom-mand subjects without them having a (possibly deluded) understanding of who theyare and why they see certain justifications to accept, for example, a patriarchal struc-ture or a certain order of gender relations. Again, genealogical critique would not bepossible if there were no such understanding to subvert, and it would also have nomaterial of critique. Power indeed works through producing normative reasons, andonly a critique of the existing relations of justification can generate the required coun-ter-power.
And as Amy cannot resist commenting on the issue of historical progress (thetopic of her new book), so I cannot resist responding, as this is such an importantissue. I fear I do not see what it means not to take a stance towards our past, asAmy suggests, and I am also not sure I understand how one can write a history of‘decline,’ as she argues, or of power, if you like, if one does not precisely takesuch a stance. When I say that we ought to reconstruct historically the normativeforce of emancipatory claims, I am also in no way committed to a story of progressthat paints this as the driving force of a liberating history. In fact, the story of toler-ation I tell in Toleration in Conflict is a dialectical one, of some moral progressand of the progress of power and domination to fight or contain such dynamics(see Forst 2013a, Forst and Brown 2014 on that dialectics).
Furthermore, to identify emancipatory movements of the past, as any theoryworth being called ‘critical’ needs to, does not lead to a self-congratulatorymoralism. It is not that ‘we’ do not have our own blind spots or would not see thenoumenal power structures at work in past societies that produced what they sawas justifications. But there have also been conflicts in such normative orders wherenoumenal power was challenged as to its justificatory quality, producing cracks insealed orders of domination. If we had no way to relate to those conflicts and therelevant claims in a careful normative way, given our distance to the past, howcould we ever try and learn from it? For example, we cannot remain agnostic withrespect to the fights between slaves and slave-owners whenever they took place,but at the same time, we need to try and understand the justificatory structuresinvolved in such societies, in ancient or modern times. Historical and normativeunderstanding cannot be separated but need to be combined in the right way, as adialectical genealogy does. The question ‘Why?’ asks us to recognize differentcontexts of justification and to transcend them at the same time (Tilly 2006).
Note1. I am grateful to Erin Pineda for directing me to these passages in King’s work, and to
her discussion of direct action in Pineda (forthcoming).
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Notes on contributorsAmy Allen is the Parents Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities and Professorof Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author ofThe Power of Feminist Theory (1999), The Politics of Our Selves (2008) and The End ofProgress (forthcoming).
Rainer Forst is professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at the Goethe UniversityFrankfurt am Main. He is Co-Director of the Research Cluster on the ‘Formation ofNormative Orders’ and of the Centre for Advanced Studies ‘Justitia Amplificata’. His majorpublications are Contexts of Justice, Toleration in Conflict, The Right to Justification andJustification and Critique.
Mark Haugaard is professor in the School of Political Science and Sociology, NationalUniversity of Ireland, Galway. He is editor of the Journal of Political Power and Chair ofIPSA RC 36, Political Power. His most recent publications include, Haugaard and Ryan (ed.)(2012) Power: The Development of the Field; Haugaard and Clegg (2012) (ed.) Power andPolitics, 4 Volumes; and Haugaard and Clegg (ed.) (2009) The Sage Handbook of Power.
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