According to thinkers of the ‘Frankfurt School’, modern society has become dominated by ‘instrumental rationality’, which prioritises technical efficiency at the expense of reflection on the goals and values guiding human nature. But how do we justify critique if we assume there are no social relationships which have not been contaminated by it? And how do we prevent our vision of an alternative kind of society from being implausibly utopian, or even authoritarian?
In this module we shall pursue three lines of inquiry. The first will look at how this problem is articulated in the first two generations of the Frankfurt School, with particular focus on Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Jürgen Habermas’s critique of the ‘colonization of the life world’. The second line of inquiry will turn to the work of Michel Foucault, which is often presented as offering an alternative model of social critique that is able to circumvent the whole problem of ‘normative foundations’, and to avoid proposing utopian alternatives. The third line of inquiry will consider Jacques Rancière’s defence of democracy, with particular attention to his distinction between the ‘police’ and ‘politics’, and his account of democratic politics as a process whereby the ‘order of the visible and sayable’ is disrupted and reorganised by demands for equality, raised by those who remain outside such an order.
- Module Supervisor: Lorna Finlayson
- Module Supervisor: Steven Gormley