Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment

The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment

Azmanova, Albena

Paperback

Series: New Directions in Critical Theory, Book 47

PhilosophyGeneral Political Science

ISBN10: 0231153813
ISBN13: 9780231153812
Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr
Published: Jun 29 2021
Pages: 296
Weight: 0.90
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

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, Albena Azmanova 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, Azmanova critiques prevailing models of deliberative democracy and their preference for ideal theory over political applicability. Instead, she 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, Azmanova centers her inquiry on the way participants in moral conflicts attribute meaning to their grievances of injustice. She then demonstrates the emancipatory potential of the model of critical deliberative judgment she forges and its capacity to guide policy making.

This model's critical force yields from its capacity to disclose the common structural sources of injustice behind conflicting claims to justice. Moving beyond the conflict between universalist and pluralist positions, Azmanova grounds the question of what is justice? in the empirical reality of who suffers? in order to discern attainable possibilities for a less unjust world.

1 different editions

Also available

Also in

Philosophy

View All