The Fortunes of Feminism. Nancy Fraser
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in which a new round of efforts to free markets from political regulation is threatening social reproduction and sparking a new wave of protectionist protest. Nevertheless, I argue here, Polanyi’s framework harbors a major blindspot. Focused single-mindedly on harms emanating from marketization, his account overlooks harms originating elsewhere, in the surrounding “society.” As a result, it neglects the fact that social protections are often vehicles of domination, aimed at entrenching hierarchies and at excluding “outsiders.” Preoccupied overwhelmingly with struggles over marketization, Polanyi occults struggles over injustices rooted in “society” and encoded in social protections.
“Between Marketization and Social Protection” aims to correct this blindspot. Seeking to develop a broader critique, I propose to transform Polanyi’s double movement into a triple movement. The key move here is to introduce a third pole of social struggle, which I call “emancipation.” Crosscutting his central conflict between marketization and social protection, emancipation aims to overcome forms of domination rooted in “society,” as well as those based in “economy.” Opposing oppressive protections without thereby becoming free-marketeers, emancipation’s ranks have included feminists as well as the billions of people—peasants, serfs, and slaves; racialized, colonized, and indigenous peoples—for whom access to a wage promised liberation from traditional authority. By thematizing emancipation as colliding with marketization and social protection, the triple movement clarifies the political terrain on which feminism operates today. On the one hand (contra Polanyi), this figure discloses the ambivalence of social protection, which often entrenches domination even while counteracting the disintegrative effects of marketization. On the other hand, however, (contra mainstream liberal feminism), the triple movement reveals the ambivalence of emancipation, which may dissolve the solidary ethical basis of social protection and can thereby foster marketization even as it dismantles domination. Probing these ambivalences, I conclude that feminists should end our dangerous liaison with marketization and forge a principled new alliance with social protection. In so doing, we could reactivate and extend the insurrectionary, anti-capitalist spirit of the second wave.
A compilation of essays written over a period of more than twenty-five years, this volume’s orientation is at once retrospective and prospective. Charting shifts in the feminist imaginary since the 1970s, it offers an interpretation of the recent history of feminist thought. At the same time, however, it looks forward, to the feminism of the future now being invented by new generations of feminist activists. Schooled in digital media and comfortable in transnational space, yet formed in the crucible of capitalist crisis, this generation promises to reinvent the feminist imagination yet again. Emerging from the long slog through identity politics, the young feminists of this generation seem poised to conjure up a new synthesis of radical democracy and social justice. Combining redistribution, recognition, and representation, they are seeking to transform a world that no longer resembles the Westphalian international system of sovereign states. Faced with the gravest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s, they have every incentive to devise new, systematic critiques that combine the enduring insights of socialist-feminism with those of newer paradigms, such as postcolonialism and ecology. Whatever helpful lessons they can glean from this volume will pale in comparison with those its author expects to learn from them.
1 The phrase “Golden Age of capitalism” comes from Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, New York: Vintage, 1996.
2 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, esp. Chapter VIII, “Marx and the Thesis of Internal Colonization,” in Volume Two: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.
3 Judith Butler, “Merely Cultural,” Social Text 52/53, 1997, 265–77.
4 Ulrich Beck, “Toward a New Critical Theory with a Cosmopolitan Intent,” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 10:4, 2003, 453–68.
5 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Geoffrey Elliott, London: Verso, 2005.
6 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 2nd ed., Boston: Beacon Press, 1944 [2001].
Radicalizing Critique in the Era of Social Democracy
What’s Critical About Critical Theory?
The Case of Habermas and Gender *
To my mind, no one has yet improved on Marx’s 1843 definition of Critical Theory as “the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age.”1 What is so appealing about this definition is its straightforwardly political character. It makes no claim to any special epistemological status but, rather, supposes that with respect to justification, there is no philosophically interesting difference between a critical theory of society and an uncritical one. But there is, according to this definition, an important political difference. A critical social theory frames its research program and its conceptual framework with an eye to the aims and activities of those oppositional social movements with which it has a partisan—though not uncritical—identification. The questions it asks and the models it designs are informed by that identification and interest. So, for example, if struggles contesting the subordination of women figured among the most significant of a given age, then a critical social theory for that time would aim, among other things, to shed light on the character and bases of such subordination. It would employ categories and explanatory models that reveal rather than occlude relations of male dominance and female subordination. And it would demystify as ideological rival approaches that obfuscate or rationalize those relations. In this situation, then, one of the standards for assessing a critical theory, once it had been subjected to all the usual tests of empirical adequacy, would be: How well does it theorize the situation and prospects of the feminist movement? To what extent does it serve the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of contemporary women?
In what follows, I will presuppose the conception of Critical Theory I have just outlined. In addition, I will take as the actual situation of our age the scenario I just sketched as hypothetical. On the basis of these presuppositions, I want to examine the critical social theory of Jürgen Habermas as elaborated in The Theory of Communicative Action and related recent writings.2 I want to read this work from the standpoint of the following questions: In what proportions and in what respects does Habermas’s theory clarify and/or mystify the bases of male dominance and female subordination in modern societies? In what proportions and in what respects does it challenge and/or replicate prevalent ideological rationalizations of such dominance and subordination? To what extent does it or can it be made to serve the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of feminist movements? In short, with respect to gender, what is critical and what is not in Habermas’s social theory?
This would be a fairly straightforward enterprise were it not for one thing. Apart from a brief discussion of feminism as a “new social movement” (a discussion I shall consider anon), Habermas says virtually nothing about gender in The Theory of Communicative Action. Given my view of Critical Theory, this is a serious deficiency. But it need not stand in the way of the sort of inquiry I am proposing. It only necessitates that one read the work from the standpoint of an absence; that one extrapolate from things Habermas does say to things he does not; that one reconstruct how various matters of concern to feminists would appear from his perspective had they been thematized.
Here, then, are the steps I shall follow. In the first section of this essay, I shall examine some elements of Habermas’s social-theoretical framework in order to see how it tends to cast childrearing and the male-headed, modern, restricted, nuclear family.