The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment
Albena Azmanova
Abstract
Theories of justice are haunted by a paradox: the more ambitious the theory of justice, the less applicable and useful the model is to political practice; yet the more politically realistic the theory, the weaker its moral ambition, rendering it unsound and equally useless. Brokering a resolution to this “judgment paradox,” the book advances a “critical consensus model” of judgment that serves the normative ideals of a just society without the help of ideal theory. Tracing the evolution of two major traditions in political philosophy—critical theory and philosophical liberalism—and the way the ... More
Theories of justice are haunted by a paradox: the more ambitious the theory of justice, the less applicable and useful the model is to political practice; yet the more politically realistic the theory, the weaker its moral ambition, rendering it unsound and equally useless. Brokering a resolution to this “judgment paradox,” the book advances a “critical consensus model” of judgment that serves the normative ideals of a just society without the help of ideal theory. Tracing the evolution of two major traditions in political philosophy—critical theory and philosophical liberalism—and the way they confront the judgment paradox, the book critiques prevailing models of deliberative democracy and their preference for ideal theory over political applicability. Instead, it replaces the reliance on normative models of democracy with an account of the dynamics of reasoned judgment produced in democratic practices of open dialogues. Combining Hannah Arendt's study of judgment with Pierre Bourdieu's social critique of power relations, and incorporating elements of political epistemology from Kant, Wittgenstein, H. L. A. Hart, Max Weber, and American philosophical pragmatism, the book centers its inquiry on the way participants in moral conflicts attribute meaning to their grievances of injustice. It then demonstrates the emancipatory potential of the model of critical deliberative judgment it forges and its capacity to guide policy making.
Keywords:
theories of justice,
political practice,
judgment paradox,
deliberative democracy,
ideal theory,
Hannah Arendt,
Pierre Bourdieu
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2012 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780231153805 |
| Published to Columbia Scholarship Online: November 2015 |
DOI:10.7312/columbia/9780231153805.001.0001 |
