Crisis, Critique, Capitalism

In recent decades, critical theorists have largely abandoned the project of a “crisis critique” of capitalist society, aimed at conceptualizing the latter’s inherently self-destabilizing tendencies, its characteristic forms of domination and social struggle, and its prospects for emancipatory social transformation. Today, however, the need for such critique is more urgent than ever. Yet far from returning to earlier models, the project must be reconstructed in a form adequate to the 21st century. Eschewing a one-dimensional focus on the economy, today’s critical theory must conceptualize the interpenetration of that aspect with other fundamental dimensions of the present crisis – ecological, political, cultural and social-reproductive. Equally important, it must incorporate the insights of new paradigms of critical theorizing, above all feminism, postcolonialism, and ecological thought, without abandoning the classical aspiration to conceptualize capitalist society as a social totality. In order to advance this project, the course will revisit three ambitious and powerful critiques of capitalist crisis: Karl Marx’s Capital, Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, and Jürgen Habermas’s Legitimation Crisis. The aim of the course is to identify the respective blindspots and insights of each these works, to reconstruct their problematic aspects, and to synthesize their best insights, all for the sake of developing an adequate model of crisis critique for the capitalism of the 21st century.

Nancy Fraser | New School for Social Research (New York)

Nancy Fraser is Henry A. Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research in New York. An Einstein Fellow of the city of Berlin, she holds the Chair «Rethinking social justice in a globalizing world» at the Collège d’études mondiales, Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme. Among her widely discussed publications are Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (2013), Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (2008), Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy Fraser Debates Her Critics (2008), Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (2003), co-authored with Axel Honneth, Mapping the Radical Imagination: Between Redistribution and Recognition (2003), Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the "Postsocialist" Condition (1997), Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (1989). Nancy Fraser currently works on a book-project entitled “Crisis, Critique, Capitalism: Re-reading Marx, Polanyi, and Habermas in the 21st Century.”