My paper, “Fractured Social Holism: A Pragmatist Political Philosophy of Emancipation,” has been accepted to the forthcoming conference, “Emancipation: Challenges at the Intersection of American and European Philosophy,” to be held at Fordham University, Lincoln Center, in New York City from February 26-28, 2015. This paper is a companion piece to the paper that I will present at the Public Philosophy Conference in June. It utilizes the distinction between first-order and second-order public problems developed in that paper in order to argue for a new Pragmatist philosophy of emancipation, which I call Fractured Social Holism.
The abstract of the paper is below the fold:
This paper outlines a framework for political philosophy that I call Fractured Social Holism (FSH). Inspired by Dewey’s Pragmatist social and political thought, FSH is situated between ideal theories of equality on the one hand, and philosophies of resistance to existing domination and oppression within society on the other. FSH therefore offers a synthetic account of political philosophy that links the institutional realm with its negation. Beginning with the non-ideal conditions of the contemporary world and its multi-faceted histories of oppression and domination, the ideal distributive paradigm of equality must be complemented by what we might call rectificatory equality or re-distributive equality.
My account consists of a critical re-articulation of Dewey’s conception of publics in The Public and Its Problems, orienting it toward issues at the heart of contemporary social and political philosophy: domination and oppression, the fact of pluralism, the importance of difference, and how democratic politics can respond to them. I argue that we should draw a distinction between second-order public problems and the more fundamental first-order public problem (singular) of the public: the very constitution of the public is itself a public problem. That is, the construction of the public from within is itself the underlying condition for the possibility for all other problems to be articulated and then solved by that public; when second-order public problems are discussed and subsequently solved, they carry implicitly within their articulation an answer to the question, “who constitutes the public who is able to participate in public problem solving?”
In asking and offering answers to this first-order public problem, political actors aim at the emancipation that comes with societal recognition and inclusion as full and equal members of the democratic polity. Emancipation fractures the would-be harmony of the social order, offering a more egalitarian vision of society that, if successful, responds to existing domination and oppression. This is democracy in action: who belongs to the community—and can therefore meaningfully participate—who does not, and how this line is drawn, are at stake within democratic community.