ALLEN, ForST and HAUGAARD - Power and Reason, Justice and Domination

Journal of Political Power , 2014 Vol. 7, No. 1, 7 – 33, 33, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2014.887540

Power and reason, justice and domination: a conversation Amy Allena , Rainer Forst b and Mark Haugaardc* a

Department of Philosophy, Philosophy, Dartmouth College, Hanover, Hanover, NH, USA; bGoethe Universität, c Frankfurt am Main, Germany; School of Political Science and Sociology, National University of Galway, Galway, Ireland

4 1 0 2 l i r p A 1 0 1 1 : 3 0 t a ] d r a a g u a H k r a M r o s s e f o r P [ y b d e d a o l n w o D

Through an email conversation between Allen, Forst and Haugaard, this article explor explores es the relati relations onship hip betwee between n the dyads dyads power power and reason reason,, justic justicee and domina dominatio tion. n. In much much of the literat literature ure reason reason is consid considere ered d either either a mode mode of emancipa emancipation tion from power (Lukes) or, conversel conversely, y, a subtle subtle ruse of dominati domination on (Foucault). Here it is argued that reasoning is intrinsic to political power, with both the potential for power as justice (Arendt), and for power as domination (Foucault and Lukes). With power and reason as normatively neutral, with both/ either normatively desirable and undesirable potentials, this raises the fundamental question of how to distinguish between justice and domination. These issues are explored, taking account of processes of subject formation and systems of thought. Keywords: power; reason; justice; domination; subjecti �cation

Mark Haugaard: As things stand, the power debates are divided between theorists who see reason as a subtle ruse of power, leading to domination, and theorists who consid consider er reason reason as the key to overco overcomi ming ng domina dominatio tion n in its most most sophis sophisti ticat cated ed forms. forms. Paradigm Paradigmatic atically ally,, this oppositi opposition on is represent represented ed by Foucault Foucault ’s assertion that nothing could be more sterile than to use reason to critique power (Foucault 1983 (Foucault 1983,, p. 210), which is diametrically diametrically opposed to Lukes ’ argum argument ent that that freedo freedom, m, as opposed opposed to dominati domination, on, entails living autonomo autonomously usly according according to the dictates dictates of reason reason (Lukes (Lukes 2005, 2005, p. 115). We have Nietzsche against Kant, which are usually considered incommensurable. However, it seems to me that the way forward is not to take sides – siding with either Nietzsche/Foucault against Kant/Lukes – rather it is to recognize that both positions have some truth to them. In more its most subtle forms, when not manifestly coercive, modes of domination are reproduced through the reasoned consent of subaltern actors. In the third dimensio dimension n of power power (Lukes (Lukes 2005), 2005), or hegemony hegemony (Gramsc (Gramscii 1998), 1998), actors actors become become part of a system of thought, or a habitus (Bourdieu 1977 1977), ), in which certain forms of domination become perceived of as reasonable because they constitute part of a taken-for-granted, second nature, knowledge knowl edge which appears as the natural order of things. In the fourth dimension of power (Digeser (Digeser 1992), 1992), in which actors become attached to subaltern subject positions, as both subjects and objects of knowledge (Foucault 1983), 1983), they come to see speci �c forms of identity as not only attractive but also locally episodically empowering, empowering, even though these identities may *Corresponding author. Email: Email: [email protected] © 2014 Taylor & Francis

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legitimate domination. Thus, to use your example, (Allen 2010), 2010), which also came up in a previo previous us exchan exchange ge (Honn (Honneth eth et al . 2010), 2010), in the the gend gender erin ing g of a fema female le actor, she is rewarded in childhood with love for being pretty, charming, and attentive to the needs of others, which entails the creation of a subject position that she will will not only only come come to be attrac attracted ted to (the (the subjec subjectt posit position ion being being associ associate ated d with with ontologically security from childhood) but she will also �nd structuring this position tion locall locally y episod episodica ically lly empowe empowerin ring, g, as other other actors actors respon respond d positi positivel vely y to her because she is occupying a structurally structurally recognizably appropriate subject position. This renders it reasonable for her to adopt, what are, in essence, relatively subaltern roles, roles, when viewed from a structur structural al and systemic systemic perspecti perspective ve (see Allen 2007). However, the success of these more subtle forms of power, which rely on local perceptions of reasonableness to reinforce domination, does not entail that we should accept the hypothesis that the use of reason solely constitutes a mode of domination. The willingness of actors to consent to domination through reason is not sim ply ‘false consciousness’, a sign of defectiveness, it also suggests that some of the time reason must also be a mode of emancipation, a road to relative freedom or justice. To borrow conceptual vocabulary from Habermas ( 1984 1984), ), the most effective form of instrumental manipulation takes place when instrumental action appears as communic communicativ ativee interact interaction. ion. Thus, the success success of this kind of manipulat manipulative ive instruinstrumental mental action action is parasiti parasiticc upon, and presuppose presupposes, s, genuine genuine communica communicative tive action. action. Similarly, the third and fourth dimensions of power presuppose that the use of reason is, indeed, in actors ’ interests some of the time. Otherwise, these dimensions of power are premised upon actors who are hoodwinked all of the time, which either entails entails an over-soc over-sociali ialized zed concept concept of agency agency (agents (agents as cultural cultural dupes/dopes), dupes/dopes), or that these actors are defective in some way (which is the source of the elitist implications of the term ‘false consciousness’) or a conspiracy theory (the subalterns are being brainwashed by an elite) – all of which are theoretically indefensible hypotheses. Therefore, I think you may well be right, Rainer, that the underlying principle of justic justicee lies lies in reason reasoned ed intera interacti ctive ve justi justi �cation cation betwe between en actors actors (Forst (Forst 2012) 2012) which is, ironically, demonstrated by the use of reason for the purposes of domination. tion. However However,, this entails entails that we must recognize recognize that what appears appears as reasoned reasoned justi�cation can also be the tool of power as domination in its most subtle forms. In distingui distinguishin shing g power/re power/reason ason which which leads to justice, justice, from power/re power/reason ason that entails domination, I think it is important to remember that it is not simply a question of distingui distinguishin shing g normativ normatively ely desirabl desirablee from undesirable undesirable modes modes of reason, reason, or reason reason from from ration rationali alizat zation ions, s, it is equall equally y impor importan tantt to reali realize ze that that power power is also also normativ normatively ely divided divided between between normativ normatively ely desirabl desirablee and undesira undesirable ble power. power. Power Power is usuall usually y assume assumed d to equate equate with with domina dominatio tion. n. Even Even when when Foucau Foucault lt states states that that power is ‘ positive’, it seems to me that he has in mind ‘ positive’ only in the empirical sense of being constitutiv constitutivee of reality reality,, for instance: instance: ‘We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it “excluded” … In fact, power produces: it produces reality;…’ (Foucault (Foucault 1979, 1979, p. 194) 194).. His His freq freque uent nt injuncti injunctions ons for us to resist resist power power and subjecti subjectivisa visation tion – ‘Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are ’ (Foucault (Foucault 1983, 1983, p. 216), and assertions such as, ‘[d]omination is in fact a general structure of power …’ (Foucault (Foucault 1983, 1983, p. 226), suggest that he took for granted that power was normatively undesir undesirabl able, e, yet inesca inescapab pable. le. In contra contrast, st, in much much of your your work work (Allen (Allen 1998, 1999, 1999, 2001 2001), ), by drawing upon Arendt ’s normatively positive characterization of power, as the capacity to act in concert (Arendt 1970 (Arendt 1970,, p. 44), you have shown

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that the power family entails not only power-over , but also power-to and powerwith. The latter two are normatively desirable and, in many instances, such as authority, power over is also normatively commendable. Further to this latter point, I have also argued that normatively commendable power over is intrinsic to the democratic process (Haugaard 2010, 2012). Thus, in distinguishing forms of power/reason, relative to justice and domination, it is not only reason which we must consider normatively Janus-faced, it is also power; or maybe you both disagree with this analysis and suggested mode of proceeding? Amy Allen: First of all, I want to say thank you to Mark for suggesting this conversation and for providing such a compelling and fruitful opening to the discussion. I agree wholeheartedly with the two major points that you have raised, which I would summarize as follows. First, we should understand reason as Janus-faced, which means that it is capable of, on the one hand, rationalizing and justifying relations of domination by generating hegemonic, taken-for-granted, naturalized systems of thought that make domination seem reasonable even to the dominated, and, on the other hand, of empowering subordinated individuals to resist their subordination, both individually and collectively, by, for example, enabling them to demand justi �cation for their condition (Forst 2012). Second, we should resist the strong tendency in the literature on power to con �ate power with power-over and power-over with domination, and should instead understand power as Janus-faced as well, in that it can take normatively desirable and normatively objectionable forms. This second point is one that I have argued for in some of my earlier work on power, as Mark mentioned, though here I would just make one small, but I think, important point, which may or may not constitute a difference between our views. On my view, all forms of power – and not only power-over – are Janus faced or normatively bivalent in the way that Mark described. Just as power-over can take benign, non-dominating forms, power-to and power-with, though typically associated with benign and empowering capacities, can reinforce and uphold domination. In this way, I part company with Arendt, who views power as she de �nes it – as the human ability not just to act but to act in concert – as an end in itself, that is, as having intrinsic normative value (Arendt 1970, cf. Allen 1999). Con�icts or disagreements often arise over whether a particular relation of power is normatively benign or objectionable. For example, is a teacher ’s exercise of power over her student a benign attempt to empower the student or a part of an authoritarian educational system designed to produce docile, obedient subjects? Is a young woman ’s embrace of her sexual empowerment – think Lady Gaga and Girls, or, if you are my age, Madonna and Sex and the City – an act of resistance to a patriarchal sexual order that denies women ’s sexual desire and freedom or is it a capitulation to a sexual order that de �nes women as objects for male sexual pleasure? Is a collective social or political exercise of power-with such as the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street a force for emancipatory change or a reactionary defense of the status quo? Of course the dif �cult question with respect to all of these examples is: how are we to distinguish between normatively benign or bene �cial and normatively problematic and objectionable relations of power, whether they are relations of powerover, power-to, or power-with? Here is where an appeal to reason often comes in, and if we follow what Mark has identi �ed as the Kantian line, then reason is all we need to make such distinctions, for we can say that relations of power are normatively benign just so long as they can be defended by appeal to reasons (usually under certain sorts of idealized procedural conditions) and they are normatively

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problematic just so long as they cannot be so defended. If, however, we accept the Janus-faced nature of reason then things become more complicated. If reason serves both to stabilize hegemonic structures of domination and to critique such structures of power, then how can an appeal to reason enable us to distinguish between benign and objectionable forms of power? A possible way out is to distinguish between actually existing or merely de facto rational agreement or consensus (e.g. about whether existing relations of power are normatively benign or not) and some stronger notion of what makes rational agreement on such matters normatively legitimate. Such a distinction appeals to a meta-level principle of reason or justi �cation – what Habermas used to call the ideal speech situation (1984) – which is itself presumed to transcend existing relations of domination – in fact, it is thought to model the very idea of nondomination. On this view, even though actually existing practices of reasoning are always, as a matter of fact and in the real world, entangled with relations of power, good and bad, the meta-level principle itself is not; hence, it can provide the criterion by means of which we distinguish between merely de facto and legitimate reasons for or justi �cations of our normative assessments about power relations. However, if we assume, as Mark has argued elsewhere (Haugaard forthcoming), that there is no such meta-level principle to be had – “there is no transcendental reason with a capital R ’ (p. 28) – because conditions of reasonableness are created through being socialized into a local habitus, to use Bourdieu’s term, then we appear to be back where we started. But this line of thought needn ’t lead us to abandon reason or to deny its positive emancipatory effects. It is compatible with the belief that reason is a powerful tool for unmasking and contesting relations of domination, and that being able to give and ask for reasons (and to have one ’s reasons be taken seriously and one ’s requests for justi�cation be heard and honored in a non-patronizing way) is empowering and can, under certain social and historical conditions, be a crucial part of transforming and overcoming relations of domination. What it does rule out is the idea that our conception of reason can be thought of as context-transcendent – that way lies what Laclau calls pernicious ideological closure (Laclau 1996; for helpful discussion, see Cooke 2006, pp. 100 – 1 04); or what Mark has identi�ed as a rei �cation of a particular, local conception of reason that leads to domination (Haugaard forthcoming, p. 37). In saying this, I actually take myself to be building on an insight of Foucault ’s, and, hence, I would quibble with Mark ’s claim, in his opening remarks, that Foucault sides against Kant and hence against reason. As I read him, when Foucault says ‘shall we try reason? ’ in the passage that Mark mentioned above, he means not ‘shall we give reason a try? ’ but, rather, ‘shall we put reason on trial ’ i.e. for its entanglements with power? It is this latter move of which Foucault says ‘nothing would be more sterile ’ (1983, p. 210). As critical theorists, we must constantly ask ourselves, as Foucault puts it elsewhere: How can we exist as rational beings, fortunately committed to practicing a rationality that is unfortunately crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers? … If critical thought itself has a function … it is precisely to accept this sort of spiral, this sort of revolving door of rationality that refers us to its necessity, to its indispensability, and, at the same time, to its intrinsic dangers. (2000, p. 358)



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Rainer Forst: Like Amy, I would like to start by saying thanks to Mark for inviting us to have this discussion and for opening it with his inspiring and challenging remarks. I am happy to engage in this discourse with two extremely powerful theorists of power from whose work I have learned a great deal. I agree with both Mark and Amy that we need dialectical accounts of both power and reason: of power as a practice of domination and as a practice of emancipation (and lots of possible in-betweens) as well as of reasoning as a means of domination or subordination and as a weapon of critique (most importantly of selfcritique) in a Kantian sense. So I would say, like Amy and Mark, that any socially situated form of reasoning, i.e. established sets of reasons and of what counts as reasonable, can be expressions of hegemonic forms of thought and possibly of an ideology, masking the unjusti �able as justi �ed. But if we say that, and especially if we engage in a certain critical social analysis of such a set of justi �cations, we have to appeal to certain standards of justi �cation that transcend that very context. So if Amy says that we cannot have such context-transcendent standards, I fear I must disagree, for then the very talk of critique as ‘unmasking’ (see above) false justi�cations would have no basis. We would just replace one form of justi �cation with another to our liking. For such a critique to be justi �ed, we need to appeal to certain standards of justi �cation that transcend existing ones for the better while at the same time insisting that we will have to criticize our own critique if it reproduces new forms of one-sided and false justi �cations (as it possibly would). But if here Amy means – citing Mark on the impossibility of having access to a pure and transcendent form of reason – that context-transcendence in the sense of no longer requiring any self-critique is impossible, then I agree – for that would be just another metaphysical slumber. Reason is the very faculty of critique, and as Kant said, it is therefore essentially self-directed: Reason must subject itself to critique in all its undertakings, and cannot restrict the freedom of critique through any prohibition without damaging itself … (…) The very existence of reason depends upon this freedom, which has no dictatorial authority, but whose claim is never anything more than the agreement of free citizens, each of whom must be able to express his reservations, indeed even his veto, without holding back. (Kant 1781/ 87, A 738 – 739, B 766 – 767)

But for that it needs certain standards, and an essential one is that one needs to give appropriate reasons to justify the assertions one makes – so if one holds a certain moral norm or interpretation of justice to be justi �ed, one needs to be able and willing to make good on that claim with reasons that are not rejectable with reciprocally and generally justi �able reasons. The criteria of reciprocity and generality we arrive at recursively from re �ecting on the validity claim of a moral norm or a norm of justice (that claims reciprocal and general validity), thus transforming these criteria into criteria of mutual justi �cation. Such justi�cation – in practice or in mente – is always a fallible and imperfect enterprise, but it is imperative given the principle of justi�cation as a principle of reason. In practical contexts, to make a long story awfully short, this entails what I call a right to justi �cation because practical reason entails not just knowledge of how one would have to justify one ’s moral claims but also that one must do so. Essential for our discussion, however, is the question of the immanent relation between reason (or reasoning), reasons and power. This is how I see things (cf.

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Forst 2013c): I think that power is a noumenal phenomenon, to say it paradoxically, and that we must place it solely in the space of reasons and of justi �cations (which might be controversial among us). We need a cognitive account of power that is neutral as to its positive or negative evaluation (we agree on the latter aspect). So let us de�ne power initially as the capacity of A to motivate B to think or do something that B would otherwise not have thought or done. It is not part of that de�nition whether this is done for good or bad reasons, for the sake of or contrary to B ’s interests, or by which means. But it is essential that power is exercised by agents over other agents as beings guided by reasons (and in that sense, ‘free’ agents). The means of the exercise of power can be a ‘ powerful’ argument, a wellfounded recommendation, an ideological description of the world, a seduction, an order that is accepted, or a threat that is perceived as real. Different from the exercise of physical force or violence, power rests on recognition and acceptance. This is not necessarily a positive form of acceptance (as Arendt thought), for the threat that is perceived as real is in that very moment also recognized and gives one a reason for action intended by A. But if, as happens in some cases, the threat by the blackmailer or the kidnapper is no longer seen as serious, their power disappears. They can still use brute force and kill the kidnapped person, but that is rather a sign of having lost power (either over those who are not willing to pay or over the kidnapped person, who refuses to recognize the kidnapper as dominant and does not comply). Power is what goes on in the head, and what goes on is recognition of a reason to act in a certain way. Power rests on perceived and recognized, accepted justi�cations (from the participant ’s perspective) – some good, some bad, some in-between (as seen from an observer ’s perspective). This is why I believe that the original phenomenon of power is of a noumenal nature: to have power means to be able – and this comes in different degrees – to use, in � uence, determine, occupy or even to seal the space of reasons for others . This can happen in a singular event (a powerful speech or a deceit), in a sequence of events or in a general social situation or structure in which certain social relations are seen as justi �ed, so that a social order comes to be accepted as an order of justi �cation. Relations and orders of power are relations and orders of justi �cation, and power arises and persists where justi �cations arise and persist, where they are integrated into certain narratives of justi �cation (Forst 2013b). In their light, social relations and institutions, but also certain ways of acting and thinking, appear as legitimate, possibly also as natural or according to God ’s will. These can be relations of domination or of equality, political or personal, and the justi �cations can be well-founded and collectively shared with good reasons, or they can be distorted and ideological (i.e. justifying a social situation of asymmetry and subordination with false reasons that could not be shared among free and equal justi �catory agents in a situation free from such distortion). Such a notion of ideology has no strong investment in the idea of ‘objective’ or ‘true interests;’ all it implies normatively is a right to justi �cation of relations between free and equal persons. So this is how I explain the Janus-face of power and its inherent relation to reasons and justi�cations. Reasoning is essential to any form of power, yet reason in a normative sense remains the capacity to criticize given justi �cations. Its very nature is to transcend itself. M. H.: I agree with most, though not all, of what you both have both said, so I want to move these ideas forward, rather than critique for the moment. As Amy



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and I converge most, I will direct what I say at Rainer (which is not intended to ignore your comments, Amy, rather to build up them). In the power debates the distinction between power and violence has often been observed (for instance, Arendt (1970), Bachrach and Baratz (1962) and Foucault 1982, p. 220) but, in my opinion, this opposition has never been adequately theorized. Following from what you have just said, Rainer, I think that the key to this distinction is the difference between compliance that rests upon recognition and acceptance by B, and compliance which rests upon coercion. In that sense, I think the blackmailer example is not the best suited to your purpose, because, even when the compliance is successful due to a credible threat, there is not reasoned acceptance (at least not normatively so) of the outcome by B. A better example would be B conceding defeat to A, where B is a party with fewer votes than A, within the context of a long-standing democracy, with a shared stable civic habitus. The losing party B does not want to concede defeat, but does so because it is the only reasonable course of action relative to their shared local habitus or democratic civic culture. Empirically speaking, power which is based upon reasoned acceptance is always much more successful, effective and stable than coercive power. Therefore, the powerful, who have gained power through coercion, have an intrinsic incentive to try to convert coercion into power which is recognized and accepted by actors B. Breaching experiments of the kind done by Gar �nkel (1984) and Milgram (2010), where students were asked to interpret everyday requests in unusual ways (Gar �nkel), or to request a seat in public transport without the usual reasons (old-age or physical in �rmity) (Milgram), show that actors �nd it deeply traumatic and have strong internal resistance to engaging in what is considered ‘unreasonable’ behaviour. In that sense, actors are effectively constrained by reason. Contrary to what Hobbes thought in premising the Leviathan upon coercion, contract based upon shared reason, without coercion, constitutes an effective source of power – example below. Coercion in this context should not only be thought of in terms of physical threats, it is theoretically valid to speak of such a thing as symbolic violence. In a situation where entering the local system of power entails subscribing to symbols and meanings that are either demeaning or alien to the actor ’s habitus, we can argue that symbolic violence takes place. The classic instance of this is colonization in which political structures are introduced which presuppose the internalization of the habitus of the colonizer. While these political structures may be reasonable to the colonizer, the absence of dialogue with the colonized entails that these structures are not reasonable relative to the habitus of actor B, except in a short-term pragmatic sense – uncle Tom, who reproduces hegemonic structures to gain shortterm advantage. Viewed historically, at a meta-level, I think the great distinctions between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft or, mechanical and organic solidarity, revolve around shifts in local language of reason and, therefore, power. Most traditional, or gemeinschaft , forms of social order, presuppose strong rei �cations, including religious belief, and clear-cut, highly emphatic, distinctions between the sacred and profane. The distinctions between these categories usually rest upon an essentialist teleological interpretation of the world, where things have an essence within them that render them sacred. These sacred essences combine together to form an intrinsic part of the telos, or ultimate end, of the society as a whole. When these

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essences are profaned the social order as a whole is prevented from realizing its ultimate end, thus it becomes imperative for actors to ‘right ’ these ‘wrongs ’. In this system of thought, the law applies differentially according to each actor, relative to status essence. Following Durkheim ’s account of altruistic suicide (Durkheim 1995 [1912]), the highest moral good is the sacri �ce of the individual for society. In this regard, the sacri �ce of Jesus for the sake of the sins (profanations) of humanity, in Christianity, and the willingness of Abraham to sacri �ce his son, in all three monotheistic faiths, are paradigmatic. From a pragmatic point of view, the combination of making the social order sacred and the perception of self-sacri �ce make instrumental sense. Actors will willingly, without coercion, sacri �ce themselves for the maintenance of the social order. They will also consider it reasonable to participate in the sacri �ce of those who have transgressed, even if they have strong affective emotional ties with the latter. At its most extreme, following the logic of Abraham, parents will consider it reasonable to sacri �ce their own children for the collective good and in cases where their offspring have profaned the sacred, sacri �ce of the offending offspring is perceived as reasonable – typically, the former entails encouraging sons to die for the community, while the latter involves the sacri �ce of daughters who have brought ‘dishonor ’. The empirical fact that these kinds of sacri �ce occur, which must be highly traumatic and entail overcoming huge internal resistance, demonstrates how effective power/reason can be – contrary to Hobbes above. Thus, local reason creates the conditions of possibility for a relatively stable power structure, which are legitimate, in the sociological sense of the term. The forms of gesellschaft power/reason, which render liberal democracies stable, are of relatively recent in origin and involve the congruence of a number of historically contingent events that result in change of habitus. For reasons of space, I can list only a few. In the natural sciences, teleology became suspect. Paradigmatic is the �gure of Newton who expressed deep concern that his account of gravity should not be interpreted as implying some new kind of new essence. Mass education in the principles of science gradually made an appeal to essences inherently suspect, even in the social �eld. Hence, for instance, essentialist arguments for differential power between men and women became unreasonable. Thus, human law slowly becomes neutral with regard to status essence in much the same way as the physical laws of science with respect to atoms. In the economic �eld, pro�t was no longer the gift of fortuna and privilege, but entailed double-entry book-keeping, which also mirrored the anonymous, de-essentialized premises of the laws of natural science. Through the logic of the marketplace, the legitimating principle of inequality within the modern world became meritocracy, whereby the actions of the individual become absolutely central. In many forms of Protestantism the belief that the individual stood alone before God gave the individual new sacred status. Previously, the three monotheistic faiths had been premised upon salvation as mediated through the community, and its attendant rituals. Bringing these elements together, for the �rst time in history, the individual became elevated above the collective, which prior to this would have appeared a formula for sel �shness, profanation, Godlessness and therefore anarchy. Thus, in place of a system of thought which elevates sacri �ce of the individual for the community as the highest good, we have a social order that sees its moral foundations along Kantian lines whereby the individual is always an end in themselves, never a means to an end, and law is neutral. Within this modern ethic the sacri �ce of the individual becomes



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entirely unreasonable. Hence, to take a paradigmatic example, to the gesellschaft interpretative horizon, Abraham’s willingness to sacri �ce his son becomes unreasonable – both God (A who asked for the sacri �ce) and Abraham (the compliant actor B) are unreasonable. In classical sociological thought (Tönnies, Marx, Durkheim and Weber) it was assumed that gesellschaft would slowly replace gemeinschaft . However, this is not what has happened. Some of the ancient forms of gemeinschaft , in particular those associated with religious belief, have lived on and adapted to new social conditions. Furthermore, new modern forms of secular gemeinschaft have emerged to replace the old. Nationalism is a form of secular gemeinschaft in the sense that it sets as its highest moral norm the principle of the sacri �ce of the individual for the collective. This is graphically illustrated by Benedict Anderson ’s observation that every nation has a sacred tomb for the unknown soldier (who is really the unknown nationalist), while liberalism has no equivalent tomb for the dead liberal (Anderson 1983, p. 10). Dead nationalists count, while dead liberals do not. In many instances religion and nationalism have been fused, allowing for particularly potent systems of thought for the purposes of reinforcing power structures. Arguably, in the context of globalization, where distinctions such as East and West, replace the identi �cations of nations, the resurgence of fundamentalist variants of Islam and Christianity constitute such a fusion. From a sociological empirical point of view both gemeinschaft and gesellschaft systems of thought reinforce power through legitimacy based upon reason. However, in a con �ict between actors from each system of thought, each sees the other as profaning what they hold to be sacred or right and just, thus the other is considered unreasonable. When one system of thought prevails over the other, those in the subject position, the actors B, read the imposition of the system of thought as symbolic violence – B feels coerced by an unreasonable A. It seems to me that the principles of liberalism and human rights are reasonable only within, broadly speaking, gesellschaft systems of thought. To move from the empirical sociological level to the normative, upholding liberal principles entails af �rming the reason of a gesellschaft world-view and being-in-the-world over that of gemeinschaft . This raises the question on what normative grounds can we justify the imposition of gesellschaft system of thought upon gemeinschaft actors? Is this not a form of symbolic violence and, thus, normatively reprehensible? In presenting the premises of these questions I have deliberately framed the questions in terms of large-scale interpretative horizons, which it is dif �cult to step outside of, to �nd a view from nowhere. I have also emphasized the historically contingent nature of these interpretative horizons, making transcendental appeals appear prima facie ethnocentric. While these are, of course, ideal types, I think that a con�ict between these two systems of thought is the foundation of the deep, as opposed to shallow, con �icts of contemporary global society. I do not present this as a refutation of what you are saying, Rainer, I am genuinely interested is seeing how we can resolve this problem, and consider it normatively imperative that we should be able to do so. A.A.: I’m sympathetic to the line of thought that Mark has raised with his contrast between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft systems of power/reason. As is see it, this is connected to the (potential) disagreement that Rainer and I have over the status of our principles of justi �cation. Rainer says that ‘if we engage in a certain critical social analysis of such a set of justi �cations, we have to appeal to certain

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standards of justi �cation that transcend that very context. ’ Even granting this point, it seems to me that it remains the case that whatever standards of justi �cation we appeal to in making our critical analysis will themselves be socially and historically situated, and thus bound up with relations of power. Acknowledging this doesn ’t lead us to endorse a facile relativism though it does, I think, push in the direction of a contextualist, immanent understanding of critique. But as I see it, that ’s perfectly �ne, because the notion of immanent critique seems suf �cient for doing the kind of critical work we are talking about here. We can draw, for example, on the notion of freedom as autonomy that emerges out of the historical tradition of the Enlightenment and argue that the normative ideal contained within that notion isn’t being realized in current structures or procedures of justi �cation because of the ways in which those procedures encode and reinforce ideological or hegemonic relations of power. This doesn ’t require us to hold that this normative standard is itself context transcendent in the sense of transcending the context of late western modernity out of which it has arisen. And yet it isn ’t a matter of simply replacing one form of justi�cations with another that is more to our liking; it is a matter of drawing on the immanent resources of our historico-philosophical tradition to critique existing standards, conceptions and practices of justi �cation. As I see it, the issue between Rainer and myself – and this issue is also being implicitly raised in Mark ’s question about how to make judgments across different systems of thought without committing symbolic violence – is not whether we need standards for critique but rather what we take the status of those standards to be. If Rainer is saying that no critical or normative standard – including the right to justi�cation – can be taken to be context-transcendent in any �nal sense – because that way lies metaphysical slumber, as Rainer puts it – then perhaps we are ultimately in agreement on that status. But then I would say that this amounts to a contextualist understanding of normativity at the meta-ethical level; and, given Rainer ’s own rather different way of conceiving of the relationship between contextualism and universalism (Forst 2002, chapter 4), I ’m fairly sure that Rainer would not agree with that way of putting it. Perhaps the difference between us then amounts to whether or not we are willing to see the substantively universal, �rst-order normative standards and principles upon which we rely as, viewed from the meta-normative perspective, contingently emergent and historically contextual standards that nevertheless enable us to engage in a robust and re �exive practice of critique. But I want to focus my remarks on the important issue, also raised by Mark, of symbolic violence. It seems to me that this concept, particularly as it is articulated in the work of thinkers such as Foucault and Bourdieu, raises a signi �cant challenge to the notion of noumenal power that Rainer has sketched out here (and argued for in more detail elsewhere) (Forst 2013b). While I agree with Mark that power that is based on reasoned acceptance is more stable and effective than coercive power, there is an important dimension of symbolic power that is not captured at all by his contrast between power based on reasoned acceptance and power based on coercion, nor is it, in my view, illuminated by Rainer ’s cognitivist conception of noumenal power: namely, power rooted in embodied dispositions, affective investments, and unconscious desires. Although I agree that power can and often does operate through reasons and justi �cations and that this challenges theorists to make sense of the Janus-faced nature of both power and reason, I think we need to make the further complication that sometimes power does not operate through reason at all but rather bypasses the reasoned consent of subaltern actors,



17

imprinting itself directly on the body or being internalized in the form of affective investments or unconscious desires. Precisely because they bypass the reasoned consent of subordinated subjects, such forms of power are even more subtle, stable and effective than power that rests on reasoned acceptance (Foucault 1980a, 1980b). As Rainer insists, power relations that rest on reasoned acceptance can always – at least in principle – be overturned by rational critique, hence a repeated and re�exive application of a principle of justi�cation is a suf �cient weapon for attacking them. Embodied dispositions, affective investments, and unconscious desires, by contrast, are not so easily challenged or transformed by the force of reason. Thinking of power as primarily or originally noumenal in nature, as Rainer suggests, leaves us ill-equipped to make sense of these other dimensions or aspects of symbolic power. Similarly, although it is no doubt the case that relations of power are connected in complex and intricate ways to relations and orders of justi �cation, it seems to me to be entirely too strong to say that they are one and the same. To see why this is the case, it might be helpful to introduce a distinction, familiar from the power theory literature, between macro-level and micro-level power relations (for a related distinction, see Forst 2013c, p. 9). Viewed from the macro-level, it makes perfect sense to say that widespread, systemic power asymmetries – such as more or less stable structures of social or political oppression – have a certain ‘logic’ to them, that is, that they can be understood in terms of certain aims or purposes, and that they need to appear to be rational, legitimate, and justi �ed in order to remain in force. The subordination of women in the United States and Europe, for example, is connected to certain narratives of justi �cation – narratives about the constraints of female embodiment or essential femininity, about women ’s proper roles as mothers, or about the implications of evolutionary biology or of our neurochemical hard-wiring, or what have you – and these narratives of justi �cation are crucial for understanding how women’s subordination is reproduced and maintained over time. This much seems perfectly plausible. But saying this does not imply the further claim, which Rainer ’s notion of noumenal power seems to imply, that the subordination of women operates originally or primarily in and through the reasoning processes of individual agents. For example, there are certain widespread narratives that are commonly taken to justify or at least to explain the fact that so few women in the United States occupy positions of power, as CEOs of large companies, senior partners in established law �rms, full professors in the best academic institutions, and so on. These narratives of justi �cation serve as ideological cover for women ’s ongoing economic, political, social and cultural subordination, not only by making it less likely that women will be chosen for such positions, but also by compelling women themselves to opt out of such positions when they are offered, or never to compete for them in the �rst place. The situation is very complicated, and has a lot to do with questions of work/family balance and reigning ideologies of motherhood. But at least one strand of these narratives has to do with a claim about women’s uneasy relationship to power. On this sort of story, women – because of evolution, or neurochemistry, or their uteruses, or whatever – are less competitive and aggressive than men, more collaborative, more nurturing, and more relational; thus, exercising power over others, so the story goes, isn ’t really feminine. Hence women (‘real’ women, that is) don ’t really ‘want ’ power (Sellers 2003); or when they exercise power, they do so in a fundamentally different, more collaborative and cooperative way; thus, power over others and a certain hegemonic conception

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of femininity – a conception that is also highly in �ected by assumptions about class, race and sexuality – are thought to be incompatible. This kind of story is widely taken to offer a justi �catory narrative for women’s ongoing economic, political and social marginalization in countries where barriers to formal equality for women have been torn down – a hegemonic justi�cation that is, to be sure, crying out for critique. But notice that none of this implies the further claim that for any individual woman who is faced with the question of whether to accept or how to assume a position of power within an organization that the demands of normative femininity operate solely or essentially or even primarily as reasons whose justi �catory force can be subjected to rational assessment. Of course it may be the case that individual women can rationally assess the justi �catory force of this narrative of normative femininity; but this does not rule out the possibility that the demands of normative femininity are simultaneously deeply encoded in the bodily dispositions, affective investments, and unconscious fantasies and desires of those very same women. For such women, violating the demands of normative femininity by appearing too powerful or power-hungry may well produce an embodied sense of shame or disrupt their affective investment in being perceived by their male colleagues as either nice or nurturing or sexually desirable (or at least not sexually undesirable). When a woman’s cheeks burn with shame because a colleague calls her ‘aggressive’ (which is almost always taken to be a negative trait in a woman, though not in a man) or she feels uncomfortable with being perceived as too powerful and therefore not nice or nurturing enough then this is the result of the power relations that sustain normative femininity imprinting themselves directly on the bodies and affective investments of their targets. That power operates not only through reasons but also through shaping our embodied dispositions and affective investments explains, as Foucault says, why power ‘is so deeply rooted and the dif �culty of eluding its embrace’ (Foucault 1980a, p. 59). The political upshot of this more complex understanding of power as not only noumenal but also embodied and affective is that the oppressed will often not experience their situation as political in the �rst place and hence will not demand justi �cation for it (Bourdieu et al. 2000). In such cases, what looks like the acceptance on the part of the oppressed of their own oppression is actually the result of a bodily incorporation of the structural violence of their social world. Such an internalization can have deeply depoliticizing effects by producing a sense in the oppressed that their oppression is inevitable (McNay forthcoming). We need a more complex understanding of power, one that understands power as not solely or originally or perhaps even primarily noumenal in nature, in order to account for this phenomenon. Perhaps for this reason we also need an understanding of justice that isn ’t based solely on the right to justi �cation. So when Rainer says ‘ power is what goes on in the head, ’ i.e. it is the ‘recognition of a reason to act differently than one would have without that reason, ’ I say, following Foucault and Bourdieu, power is not only what goes on in the head, it is also what goes on in the body, in our bodily dispositions, our affective investments, and our unconscious fantasies and desires. These dispositions, investments, fantasies and desires may well be connected to recognized and accepted narratives or orders of justi�cation – in fact, in cases of systemic relations of dominance and subordination, such as racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and colonialism, they are probably always connected to some sort of hegemonic



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narratives of justi�cation – but this does not mean that they are inculcated in individuals through or by means of [i.e. that they ‘rest on’] such justi �cations or even that they are recognized by their targets as reasons to act in a certain way. If we want to dismantle and transform those relations of dominance and subordination, we will need to be armed with something more than the force of good reasons; we will also need some account of how it is possible to transform our embodied dispositions and practices and affective investments and desires. We will have to accept, I would say, that there are aspects of social life where reason does not have as much force as we might like to think it does. At the same time, if we agree, as Mark has suggested above, that our conceptions of reason and systems of thought are always bound up with relations of power such that our moral and political judgments can mask relationships of symbolic violence, then we ought to be suspicious of the very idea of the unforced force of the better argument (Allen 2012). Reason always has a force, in the sense that it is always intertwined with relations of power; and yet there are also aspects of our lives in which reason may not have as much force as philosophers would like to think. R.F.: It seems that our trialogue has moved from an initial agreement to substantive disagreement at more foundational levels and that, I think, is for the better. For it brings out important philosophical issues underlying sociological analyses of power. I am therefore happy to respond to Mark ’s charge of committing symbolic violence in imposing a Gesellschaft system of ideas on Gemeinschaft actors by returning the charge: I think characterizing contemporary social forms in that dualistic way is inadequate and potentially rei �es cultural and social identities and, most of all, leaves no room for internal dissent and radical critique from within so-called Gemeinschaft societies. Thus it is sociologically and normatively problematic, possibly itself a case of symbolic violence and of ethnocentrism, to reserve certain normative notions of emancipation only for ‘modern’ societies. I am also glad to reply similarly to Amy ’s charge of being a hypercognitivist about reasons and power and ignoring the effects power has on human bodies. I think that the super-Cartesian here is not me but Amy, as she thinks that there is a categorial difference between the way beliefs are formed and the way bodies are formed, while I think that both are different aspects of the same process, which Foucault described as the effects of ‘truth regimes.’ Amy is also more Cartesian than me in thinking that whenever I describe a process as one of reasons and reasoning, puri �ed reason and re �exivity or ‘reasoned consent ’ are somehow at work – which is not what I say: there are reasons and reasoning , yet reason is the faculty of critically re �ecting on certain reasons and forms of reasoning which might turn out to be unreasonable (i.e. re�exively unjusti�able). Ideology is an example for a cluster of beliefs accepted on the basis of bad reasons, forming complexes of justi �cation that colonize and �xate the noumenal realm of justi �cations and thus shield these justi �cations from re�exive scrutiny. So we must enlarge our idea of the noumenal to include bad justi�cations, but they are nevertheless justi �cations for those who hold and follow them. That is quite a mouthful, so let me brie �y explain. I agree with Mark about the importance of drawing a distinction between power and violence, yet I also think that the distinction between violence and coercion is important. Unlike violence, which tries to eliminate the possibility of an alternative of at least two kinds of reaction on the side of the attacked person, coercion still works upon a free agent insofar as there are at least the two options of compliance and non-compliance left. So in the blackmailing case, there is of course no

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normatively demanding and suf �cient form of acceptance possible, yet there is still acceptance and recognition of a reason to act in a certain way – a reason one could reject, though at a high price. That is why I think that a blackmailing situation is different from one where violence is exercised and where the victim is a pure object of another ’s action. I think we need more �ne-grained distinctions as to the different qualities of ‘recognition and acceptance ’ of reasons, not an either-or. Given that, I think the notion of ‘symbolic violence’ is only appropriate where the dominating and hegemonic set of meanings and beliefs completely colonizes the mind of others and the internalization is very strong. Tönnies’s old distinction (used by Mark) between Gemeinschaft and Gesell schaft continues to be heuristically useful, yet only as ideal types, and there are many ways to describe the change of normative orders from one to the other (one of which I suggested in my toleration book, Forst 2013a). I think Mark is right to point out that classical modernization theory needs to be rethought today, but very much along these lines I would also say that in the contemporary world we �nd many different societies following very different paths of modernization that lead rather to ‘multiple modernities ’ (Eisenstadt) than to polar forms of social order to be described using the G-G-dualism. So I see the point about the development of a ‘modern ethic’ that Mark thinks separates the two orders, given Western history, but I think we need a different structural story about such an ethic – one that understands the historical dynamic of social change and emancipation in terms that do not reserve such a dynamic to Western societies with a Christian background. As much as I agree with Mark ’s brief reconstruction of the aspects of Western modernization, I think we need to stress the social con �icts that were driving these processes. These were con�icts in which a given normative order was challenged to provide better and new justi �cations for certain norms and structures, as the dominant metaphysical or religious or feudal or patriarchal or monarchist (or com binations thereof) narratives of justi �cation were no longer seen as acceptable. Thus those who dissented claimed �rst of all a right to justi �cation for themselves – the right to demand proper justi �cations that could withstand rational scrutiny (i.e. what was seen as rational scrutiny given new developments in science and morality). Those critics thus spoke a new language – such as when the Levellers rede �ned political rule as requiring a contract between free and equal persons in order to be legitimate – a radically new language at odds with most of the dominant norms. In their eyes, these ‘unreasonable’ (from a conventional perspective) claims were the most reasonable; thus there was a con�ict between different forms of thinking about reasonable justi �cation. So are we now, as observers of this history but also as distant parts of it, and thus still participants, to say that these were purely ‘contingent ’ developments and that – as I take Amy and Mark to argue – the radical claims of these dissenters could only be called ‘reasonable’ after they had achieved a turn in history in their direction? That strikes me as problematic – for that could amount to a form of neo-Hegelian Darwinism in which those victorious in history are given the power to de �ne normative truth and reasonableness (and it is, just as an aside, a serious question who actually dominated Western history). I take this to be an historical and a normative mistake: historical, since then we cannot understand the force of the radical claims of these critics as they understood it and as it led to radical change in the �rst place, thus cutting off the participant ’s perspective completely; and normative, as we would have to say to those who protested then (as well as today) against patriarchy and authoritarianism that we �rst have to await



21

the verdict of history before we can say anything about the justi�cation of their claims. But with Benjamin I think that we must not leave the authority to de �ne the truth of emancipatory claims to the historically victorious. We need to take a stance, as we are (still) part of these social struggles. As such participants, I do not think we have the metaphysical luxury of inhabiting a divine standpoint from which we could call those historical developments either ‘contingent ’ or ‘necessary’. I �nd both stances mysteriously ahistorical, searching for an outer-worldly position sub specie aeternitatis, which we cannot have. Rather, we need to understand that to think historically is to try to reconstruct the normative force of emancipatory claims, such as the right to justi �cation, in various social contexts. In other words, when radical critics like Pierre Bayle (see Forst 2013a, § 18) denied current religious worldviews and argued for a morality of reciprocity and universality free from religious grounding, he was not ‘imposing ’ a foreign language on the traditional society of his time; rather, he was pointing to the re�exive truth that norms that claim to be universally and reciprocally valid have to ‘earn’ their validity through arguments heeding these criteria. He was truly innovative by pointing to that re �exive truth and he arrived at it aided by a number of developments in the space of reasons during his time, but when he wrote, that space had not been changed in its hegemonic form. Thus, we deny such radical critics their validity when we say that only after they were successful, could they have been right. That is Darwinism about reasons. Likewise, it is a mistake to think that when someone or a group in a contemporary society – which Mark would categorize as a Gemeinschaft – raises a radical feminist or democratic or socialist demand, he or she is ‘imposing ’ a Gesellschaft view on her or his society. There have indeed been many past and present colonizing impositions from the outside, yet internal critique that reclaims the right to justi�cation as the core of whatever is claimed concretely cannot be counted as such a colonization. We would expatriate those internal critics if we did so. And we would fall prey to an ethnocentric view that homogenizes non-Western societies as frameworks in which no radical critique asking for new and better reasons were either possible or legitimate. We would also ignore ‘our ’ own history of radical critique, which was greeted with the same attitude of being ‘strange’, ‘foreign’ or ‘unreasonable.’ The ethnocentrism and symbolic violence (if any) thus does not lie in making context-transcending appeals to a right to be treated as a justi �catory equal, but in sealing off normative social orders according to geographic or temporal lines. Based on that view, I agree with Amy ’s stress on the importance of internal or immanent critique, as no social critic, no matter how radical, is not also an ‘immanent critic.’ But again, why can someone in a non-Western society not claim to be respected as an equal even if her or his society hardly has any such notion as part of its ‘historical tradition ’? Must critics have national-traditional passports of plausi ble historically embedded criticism? And did the ones in ‘our ’ tradition have such passports? And if we are ‘immanent ’ critics today and want to argue for social change, what are the criteria by which we choose which norms of ‘our ’ tradition we should appeal to, given that it might be (as all of us agree) so heavily marked by norms of nationalism, ethnocentrism, patriarchy, homophobia etc.? ‘Immanence’ is not a suf �cient criterion for normative social criticism; yet otherworldly transcendence or pure reason is not available either. Thus, only reason – constantly re�ecting on what counts as ‘reasonable’ and whether that is deserved – can provide a (fallible) solution here. That is a notion of reason that de �es the dualisms between

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vs. ‘transcendental’ or ‘historical’ vs. ‘ahistorical’. It is the best we have, �nite creatures as we are, yet re �exive ones. Amy is rightly worried whether a notion of ‘noumenal power ’ has the tools to understand ‘ power rooted in embodied dispositions, affective investments, and unconscious desires’ I think it does, but for that we need to free ourselves from an overly ‘ pure’ idea of the noumenal. In my use of the term, it stands for the realm of justi�cations generally, descriptively speaking, thus also harboring false, onesided or ideological justi�cations. The noumenal is far from identical with the realm of justi �cations based on ‘reasoned acceptance’ as Mark and Amy believe. So the real question between us is how we should understand the kind of power that leads to the ‘embodied’ effects Amy has in mind and that she analyses in her own work on the subject-forming aspects of power (Allen 1999, 2008). I am not sure, however, how deep our disagreement here actually is. For given my extended notion of the noumenal, I agree with Amy that narratives of justi�cation have the effect of colonizing the mind and self-awareness of subordinated subjects – in her example women who participate in the reproduction certain stereotypes about themselves and their proper social roles. I don ’t see why we should not say that such a form of mind colonization is a sealing off of the space of reasons for such women, who cannot ‘think ’ of behaving differently and thus would ‘feel’ awkward if they did. Already these interchangeable wordings show that we should not construct an arti �cial boundary here between the cognitive and the emotional, for in the end we talk about a self-image or a self-understanding that has been ‘ produced’ by webs of beliefs and discourses as well as by a ‘discipline’ of socialization. Yet as we can learn from Foucault, such discipline works through a discursive nexus of truth and power and I do not see the point of giving that nexus a non-cognitivist reading. What would the Foucauldian vocabulary of ‘truth regimes’, ‘discourse’, etc. mean otherwise: ‘We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth. ’ (Foucault 1980c, p. 93). And that is a truth about ourselves, including a truth about our bodies, guided by schemes separating the ‘normal ’ from the ‘abnormal’ or using other binary codes. The effect of that is a certain ‘ body awareness’ as well as certain ‘views’ or ‘feelings’ about ourselves, but I am not sure whether these are located in different parts of our brains or, seriously speaking, in different compartments called ‘ beliefs’, ‘reasons’ or ‘emotions ’ or ‘head’ vs. ‘ body’ (p. 22). In short, what I am saying is that I don ’t believe in ‘ bodies’ as separate non-cognitive entities relevant in this context. Thus, I am also not sure what it means to say that normative notions of femininity imprint themselves ‘directly ’ (p. 21) onto bodies. I would say that discursive power shapes our minds and beliefs as much as our bodies and our awareness of them, and the point of seeing the effects of power is precisely to see not just how these aspects are intertwined but that they are one and the same effect. We have to overcome Cartesian dualism, even if it is reproduced in Freudian terms. How else – and I think I agree with Amy ’s �nal statements here – could we understand the power of racism, sexism, heteronormativity, etc. if not through the complex understanding of what it means to internalize not just norms of behavior and self-images, but also beliefs about ourselves and why it is right to think or feel in certain ways? And how, if that connection between reasons, beliefs, narratives and emotions were not in place, could genealogical critique – which reconstructs and lays open this complex – ever hope to be successful? I mean of course the critique we �nd in



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Amy’s works – highly re�ned, rational and powerful as it is. It doesn ’t sound to me like a program of mere ‘re-education,’ rather like one of re�exive criticism which at least hopes to �nd a foothold in the capacities of social agents to re �ect on themselves – their beliefs and their feelings as well as how they were formed. M.H.: I do not think much separates us. Just to clarify, by noumenal power you mean the core process whereby actor A gets B to do something that they would not otherwise do, which takes place through a process whereby B �nds themselves constrained by shared reasoning. In this situation it is possible that B could be ‘unreasonable’, but this would entail a high cost for B. As I argued earlier, with regard to the breaching experiments, most actors are constrained by local conditions of reasonableness. Building upon that, we would agree that third and fourth dimensions of power are instances where this mechanism of noumenal reasonable constraint is used in a deceitful way – for instance, by appealing to tacitly held beliefs that are not properly interrogated, the strategic use of truth claims to reify conventional practices, or the creation of subject positions that predispose actors into considering domination reasonable or desirable – Amy’s point above. These processes exploit the mechanisms of noumenal power for the purposes of domination. With our critical focus upon the third and fourth dimensions of power, we must not forget, as the followers of Foucault tend to, that the reinforcement of domination through noumenal power is parasitic upon a belief in reasonable justice that cannot be wrong all of the time. Some of the time, A prevails over B because it is actually reasonable for B to comply, as measured relative to justice and the longer term interests of B. An obvious instance where reason and justice are synchronic would be when B �nd themselves prevailed upon in a free and fair election – it is reasonable in every way for B to concede defeat when they have fewer votes than A. Even though B is defeated, it is still in B ’s longer-term interests that the structures of the democratic process are reproduced, which is also just. As I have argued elsewhere (2012 and forthcoming), the episodic interest of B in winning that particular election are of a lesser order than the dispositional interests that B has in the structured reproduction of what is a reasonable system. I hope this is an accurate coming together of my and your theoretical positions, Rainer? I think where the disagreement with you comes in (for both myself and Amy) can be explained by the theorization of three levels of noumenal con �ict. The �rst level, which is the least problematic, is where A and B share a system of meaning and deep moral foundations. Even with deeply con �icting goals, social reproduction has the potential (once three and four dimensional power are exposed) to work perfectly. Actor A should be able to use reason relatively unproblematically to prevail over B, as compliance by B is actually reasonable for B, as measured against B’s longer-term dispositional interests. In such a society the structures of the system, while perhaps not perfectly egalitarian, are in the interests of the worst off, as measured relative to any realistic (not utopian) alternatives. The next level is where there is a con �ict over meaning. This is more problematic as there is no transcendental court of appeal for the meaning of signi �ers. We are dealing with different language games (Wittgenstein) or systems of thought (Foucault). However, a shared mutually endorsed noumenal power outcome is possible as long as the actors follow Habermasian principles of being open to the meanings of other. This remains a middle level con �ict, as long as there are shared norms. The current controversies in Europe over the wearing of the niqab are of this level. The critique by contextualist multiculturalists of the liberal position is

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usually along the lines that liberals assume that the niqab is a symbol of oppression (see, for instance, Allison 2011, pp. 686 – 88, Cochoran 2013). However, typically, the critique then goes on to argue that in complex modern liberal societies women wear the niqab as an expression of identity that empowers them. The multicultural argument does not entail that we should respect patriarchal domination of women. In this dispute what divides the multicultural contextualist from their supposed liberal adversaries is the attributed meaning of niqab. Both would appear to agree that the woman’s right to choose, her autonomy, should be respected. Thus, normatively, this form of contextualist multiculturalism is actually liberal – despite contextualist claims to radicalism. Similarly, Foucault ’s critique represents a middle level con�ict, rather than anything more radical. He is alerting us to the fact that other may have a different interpretative horizon and he makes us aware that the constitution of our subject positions may entail internalizing dispositions that are inimical to our autonomy – as in Amy ’s examples above. Yet, Foucault is still upholding fundamentally liberal principles by assuming that autonomy is normatively desirable. Foucault once described the disagreement between Marx and the bourgeois economists as a storm in a child ’s paddling pool (1970, p. 262). I would say the con�ict between his level of contextualism and that of liberals, while not a storm in a child ’s paddling pool (level one con �ict), is a storm in a lake, not an ocean storm, which is level three con �ict. A level three con �ict takes place when noumenal power does not bind because both the systems of meaning and fundamental norms are in con �ict. To return to my ideal type resurrection of the distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft , there is a fundamental difference between a system of morality that presupposes that normative rightness is to be found with reference to the higher ideals of the community and normative principles that start from the individual. To adapt Taylor (1989), part of gesellschaft reasoning entails adherence to the signi �cance, almost sacredness (in Alexander ’s civil sense 2003), of the ordinary life, which is summarized by the Kantian idea that individuals are always ends in themselves, never a means to an end. Parenthetically, I diverge from Taylor in that I do not think this idea is uniquely modern or Western. In a strongly normatively bound gemeinschaft the highest good entails the willingness to sacri�ce the self for the community, which is considered freedom. As described in Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life, the person is only whole to the extent to which they realize themselves through the community. God is, of course, the ultimate representation of the community. Upon death the virtuous become part of God, the essence of the community, thus free. The �ip side of this is, unfortunately, that those who stand out against the community must be cast out from it. This usually takes place through ostracism, which exists on a scale from not speaking to the subject, to physical expulsion and, ultimately, physical annihilation. To take a speci�c instance, recently, in northern India a young couple were killed and burned alongside each other on a funeral pyre for the crime of falling in love and attempting to by-pass the traditional route of arranged marriage. When the journalist went to interview the families there was no feeling of remorse. The killings were justi �ed with statements like: ‘… whatever God wanted, happened …’ ‘What was done to them was the right thing to do. We had to set an example. ’ ‘Our culture is not like you have in the city. Here our women live behind curtains …’ ‘The village doesn’t approve of love affairs here. ’ (BBC 2013). These



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responses do not make sense relative to a liberal moral world-view but, unfortunately, they do relative to a gemeinschaft one. In interpreting this we have take seriously that for these families the killing of their own offspring must have entailed overcoming massive internal resistance. Yet, their sense of honour, tied to community, compelled them to do it. It is an instance of noumenal power at its most extreme, with deep resistance, yet compelling. Our difference from these social actors is not simply about meaning: it entails moral foundations. In the case of deep con �ict, prevailing over the other entails either or both sym bolic and physical violence because there is no shared reason to mutually constrain the interaction. Honour killings are outlawed in India and, presumably, the coercion attached to this, including long prison sentences, is somewhat effective in deterring them. Maybe, over time, there is a feedback from law to habitus, so these views become questioned. However, the point remains that this form of deep con �ict is theoretically possible. I have two responses to deep con �ict. On the one hand it seems to me intuitively obvious that the gemeinschaft moral system constitutes a form of alienation, which can be unmasked, thus subject to noumenal power. However, my deep down sociological sense tells me that this view is naive. Hence, my more considered response is that we have to be honest enough to admit to symbolic violence on our own part. It only seems reasonable to me that political institutions are for individuals, not the other way around. However, if someone else has been socialized into believing that individuals exist for the greater glory of the Community, according to some divine plan, or secular prophet (such as Chairman Mao), I have to admit, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, my spade is turned. However, acknowledging this, I am willing to defend the rights of the inevitable minority within that other community who wish to live their lives for themselves, to live autonomously and, for instance, to fall in love and marry with whom they chose. That is, even if such a defence entails acknowledging symbolic violence against the deeply felt moral commitments of that community. As a quali�cation upon the above I have presented gemeinschaft purely negatively and gesellschaft positively. This is not correct, as both have positive and negative aspects. However, for reasons of clarity within limited space, I have chosen one particular aspect of each. The focus here is noumenal power and its limits, not a full characterization of the strengths and weaknesses of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft . A.A.: I’m inclined to agree with Rainer that our discussion has moved to substantive disagreement at more foundational levels, and that this is a good thing, too. In my closing remarks, I would like to brie �y sketch out what I take to be the fundamental points of disagreement between Rainer and myself; in the end, I will return brie�y to Rainer ’s exchange with Mark. Let me start, brie �y, with the issue of metaphysics, which Rainer raised implicitly by calling me a super-Cartesian. This is an interesting point, vividly expressed, but it does not describe my position. I have made no claims about the metaphysical status of either ‘ bodies’ or ‘minds’ or the categorial differences between them. If I were forced to articulate a metaphysical position with respect to power, I would incline toward nominalism, of the sort expressed by Foucault when he wrote: ‘ power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society ’ (Foucault 1978, p. 93).

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I begin with the charge of Cartesianism because, I think, this disagreement points to a fundamental methodological difference between Rainer and myself. In my view, the goal of an analysis of power is not the Platonic aim of producing a theory of power that correctly discerns the essence of the concept. This is an ambition that, it seems to me, is expressed in Rainer ’s talk of ‘the real phenomenon of power ’ (Forst 2013c, p. 1) and ‘ the original phenomenon of power ’ (Forst 2013c, p. 5). Rather, as I see it, the goal is to develop a conceptualization of power that can serve as the basis for speci�c forms of social criticism in the historical present. Such a conceptualization must be, as Foucault said, ‘ ongoing,’ which is to say that it must be checked against the historical conditions that motivate it and the empirical reality that it aims to illuminate (Foucault 1982, p. 209). That is the spirit in which I have offered some criticisms of Rainer ’s conception of noumenal power – not with the aim of offering a competing theory of the essence of power but rather with the aim of assessing his proposed conceptualization of power against our current historical circumstances and the empirical realities that the analysis of power aims to illuminate. Second, let me return to the relationship between power and the body, starting with an interpretive point: one of the major lines of argument in Foucault ’s Disci pline and Punish is that modern, disciplinary power imprints itself directly on the body, and that what we call the ‘soul’ is actually the effect of that process. This is the central argument of the opening chapter, ‘The Body of the Condemned,’ the penultimate paragraph of which ends with the following lines, which effect a stunning inversion of the Platonic dictum that the body is the prison of the soul: The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body’. (Foucault 1979, p. 30)

This is just to say that whatever one thinks in the end about the claim that power is solely or originally noumenal, Foucault ’s analysis of power is more at odds with Rainer ’s cognitivist account than he seems to realize (see Forst 2013c, pp. 8 – 9). Of course, the more important issue here is not really who has got Foucault right but rather whether thinking of power as imprinting itself directly on the body is a useful or fruitful way to think about power. In this connection, it is perhaps worth noting that the idea that disciplinary power imprints itself directly on the body has proved enormously productive for feminist theory, as is amply demonstrated by Sandra Bartky’s classic analysis of what she calls the disciplinary practices through which normative femininity is imprinted on female bodies, practices which include dieting, exercise, regimentation of bodily gestures, postures, and comportment, and ornamentation (Bartky 1990). Other groundbreaking work in this vein includes that of Bordo (2003), Heyes (2007) and Young (1990). This at least suggests that the notion of disciplinary power imprinting itself directly on the body has proven a powerful theoretical tool for feminist theory. Moreover, it is not clear that Rainer ’s alternative noumenal account of power is able make sense of this phenomenon in the way that he supposes. If power is de �ned as justi�catory power, then it must always operate within the space of reasons; whatever embodied or affective or unconscious forces serve to close off the space of reasons for certain individuals or oppressed groups are, ex hypothesi, operating outside of the space of reasons, precisely insofar



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as they constitute that very space. I think that critical theorists absolutely need such a conception of power (see Saar 2011), but unlike Rainer, I don ’t see how such a conception could be a noumenal one, even in his more expansive sense of this term. The relationship between power and the body is also crucially, though perhaps less obviously, important for thinking about the role that social movements play in social and political transformation. Social movements engage in embodied political practices such as sit-ins, public protests, demonstrations, marches, occupations, acts of civil disobedience, and even hunger strikes. Such forms of social and political action are not, I think, well-illuminated by an account of political power that conceptualizes these practices in terms of a kind of reason-giving or justi �catory power. Rather, as the great theorist and practitioner of non-violent social protest, Dr Martin Luther King, noted in one of his most famous writings ( 1963), direct action involves presenting ‘our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. ’1 However, despite King’s talk here of an appeal to the conscience of the community, direct action is not understood primarily as the giving of a reason; rather, the ‘very purpose of direct action ’ is to force one ’s political opponents to negotiate: ‘ Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.’ What makes this kind of oppositional, non-reason-oriented stance necessary is the very nature of the injustice and domination that civil rights activists were �ghting against. As King notes, ‘we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily … freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. ’ Creating this sort of pressure in the context of the civil rights struggle required individuals to put their bodies on the line, to subject themselves to the jeers of hostile crowds, to violent treatment at the hands of police, and to arrest for having violated unjust laws. A theory of power that understands power in strictly noumenal terms is not well suited to make sense of this type of embodied, oppositional political protest, which as the history of the civil rights movement in the United States shows, has formed an important part of emancipatory social change. To these examples, I imagine Rainer would respond that, on his view, reasons are actually doing the work in these examples just cited. Women shape their bodies according to the dictates of normative femininity, if they do so, only if they take the demands of normative femininity as reasons for behaving in certain ways, and the white community in the US south in the early 1960s only negotiated with civil rights protestors because they perceived the unrest created by their protests as a reason for acting. This takes us back to Mark ’s earlier distinction between compliance that rests upon recognition and acceptance of a reason and compliance that rests on coercion. Rainer ’s response to this distinction was to say that he is using the term ‘ reasons’ in a purely descriptive sense that can encompass bad or ideological justi �cations, and thus is not limited to a strongly normative notion of reasoned acceptance. I confess that I am very worried that this way of thinking about power, when applied to situations of oppression, tends toward the old cliché that ‘no one can oppress you without your permission,’ a view that puts too much responsibility on the victims of domination and not enough on those who are doing the dominating. I also worry that this response rests on a con �ation between explanatory reasons – i.e. reasons understood in a purely descriptive, non-normative sense, as causes for certain kinds of actions

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that may or may not be recognized as such by the actors – and justi�catory or normative reasons – i.e. reasons that count (or, since Rainer insists that there can be good or bad justi�cations, at least seem to count) in favor of certain actions. To be clear, I suspect that Rainer ’s view is that, when it comes to human actions, there are only justi�catory or normative reasons – that is, there are either good reasons or pro tanto reasons, but both of these are at least candidates for justi �cation, and hence are normative reasons in that sense – and that it makes no sense to talk about what I have called here explanatory reasons. Be that as it may, it seems to me that some of the initial plausibility of his conception of noumenal power rests on the fact that pretty much anything can serve as an explanatory reason, hence it is intuitively plausible to say things like ‘ the reason that he left 1 million dollars in a suitcase in the park is that he was being blackmailed ’ or ‘ the reason that she is constantly on a diet is that she is under the sway of normative femininity ’ or ‘the reason that they took down the signs that said “Whites Only” is that they feared the unrest caused by the civil rights protests.’ But from this it does not follow that blackmail or normative femininity or even civil rights protests function as reasons in the justi �catory or normative sense (even if we grant that at least the � rst two are bad or ideological versions of such types of reasons) that rest on perceived, recognized and accepted justi �cations (again, even if those justi�cations are false or one-sided in some way). There can be good and bad justi�catory reasons but there can also be forms of power that cause others to act in certain ways but that do so without working through the rational acceptance or recognition – whether that acceptance is well-justi �ed or not – of those actors. Finally, I cannot resist a short response to Rainer and Mark ’s debate about the relationship between power and claims about historical progress (or regress). I agree with Mark ’s point that in cases of what he calls deep con �ict, we may well reach a point where our spade is turned. I would just like to go beyond this to make two quick, further points, both of which would require much more extensive argument to vindicate. First, even if we grant that Rainer ’s worry about Darwinism applied to reasons is a serious one, it seems to me that his view is open to an equally serious worry, namely that it commits us to saying that throughout most of the history of the world, most people have been morally wrong, or at least morally worse than ‘us’, i.e. those who have recognized the emancipatory force of the right to justi �cation. This is a version of what Pauline Kleingeld calls the ‘moral equality’ problem in Kant ’s practical philosophy (1999); unlike Kleingeld and, I suspect, Rainer, I think we should be a bit more sanguine about biting this particular bullet, since doing so smacks of a moral hubris of which we should be wary. Second, I take issue with Rainer ’s claim that ‘to think historically is to try to reconstruct the normative force of emancipatory claims such as the right to justi �cation’. Certainly this is one mode of historical thinking, but it is far from the only one – one can also view history as a story of decline and fall or as a series of discrete epochs that are punctuated by discontinuous breaks – nor is it obvious that this mode of historical thinking is best suited to a critical theory that aims to put the issue of domination or injustice at its center, as I think Rainer and I both aim to do. A more promising mode, in my view, would be one that enables us not to take a stance on normative con �icts in the past – I ’m really not sure what we gain by this – but rather to understand our own, present-day, taken-for-granted normative assumptions differently. A history, that is, not of the past, but of the present, where the aim is not to vindicate our own perspective but rather to problematize it. R.F.: It has been a privilege to have this discussion with two of the most important theorists of power of our time, so I should not use the additional



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privilege of having a last word to open up further issues between us. Rather, I shall brie�y respond with respect to what I regard as the most important points we have focused on. I readily admit that the term ‘noumenal power ’ may lead to misunderstandings, so let me reiterate that it does not mean, as Mark and Amy seem to imply, only forms of power that are based on ‘shared reasoning’ as a form of ‘reasoned acceptance’ in a re�exive mode. Its meaning is broader than that, as it also refers to ideological or disciplinary discursive forms of thought. Noumenal power works through justi�cations (good or bad) taken over by those subjected to it, and there are many modes of this acceptance, some re �exive and some not. Still, I agree with Mark that for any form of power to operate, a common framework of meanings that makes communication possible is necessary – at least common to the extent that A knows what B means by using certain expressions, even if never using them oneself (like words referring to slaves, e.g.). But that is a weaker requirement than a notion of ‘reasonable justice’ as Mark presupposes. Implicitly, however, any structure of communication and justi �cation, as asymmetrical as it might be, does not just rest on local modes of justi �cation and on what counts as ‘reasonable’ but also harbors the (noumenal) possibility that a justi �cation (or way of justifying social relations) is re �exively questioned with respect to the validity claim that is being raised. When this happens, a more radical principle is used than merely a local one – in its most radical form, it is the principle that a norm can only claim reciprocal and general validity if it has been arrived at through a discourse guided by the criteria of reciprocity and generality. This is a principle both immanent to and transcending practices of justi �cation, and it is in social struggles over justi �cations that this re �exive principle comes to the fore. From that angle, I very much appreciate the distinction between three levels of social con�ict that Mark suggests. They require social agents to reach higher levels of re�exivity as given justi �cations are being challenged. In con �icts over goals, a shared normative order secures agreement despite disagreement. In con �icts over meanings, certain aspects of such a normative order need to be reconsidered and reconstructed while others remain in place. Things are different with respect to what Mark considers to be a con �ict between fundamentally different normative orders of a Gesellschaft vs. Gemeinschaft type. In the example that Mark gives, we �nd a traditional order of justi �cation with a thick form of noumenal power that can even motivate families to sacri �ce some of their members for reasons of social honor and communal Sittlichkeit . I agree with Mark that there is a fundamental moral difference involved in such a con �ict, though I am not sure why opposition to such a form of Sittlichkeit by, for example, those who dissent from it or those who are solidary with these dissenters, constitutes ‘symbolic violence,’ as Mark argues. For those dissenters, the hegemonic form of the traditional normative order has lost most of its noumenal power, but that does not mean that their opposition to the violence done to them is itself violent, as they claim and use a right to question the dominant justi �cations as subjects who deny the validity claims of the traditional order over them – so yes, it is a radical power challenge and con �ict, but no, the dissenters thereby resist the symbolic (or real) violence of an order which denies their justi �catory standing while at the same time claiming authority over them. They do not equally subject others to such violence – though they may be forced to defend themselves with violence – as they only ask to be taken seriously as justi�catory subjects and not to be overpowered and dominated. They resist

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domination but do not themselves dominate. And they do not necessarily use an alternative Gesellschaft frame for their critique; rather, they draw out a radical consequence from within a normative order that claims validity over them. I am grateful to Amy Allen for pressing me hard on fundamental issues concerning an analysis of power. And while I tried to identify a thorough Cartesianism in her thought, she accuses me of Platonism, searching for the ‘essence’ of the concept of power. Now I readily admit that I am interested in the essence, i.e. true meaning, of that concept as far as �nite beings can determine it, but I do not see why that commits me to Platonism, as I make no metaphysical claim about such an essence as existing as a timeless idea. As far as Foucault ’s history of power as a nexus between truth and power is concerned, I still have trouble understanding how a ‘soul’ could imprison the ‘ body’ in the way Foucault analyses it if one disregards the noumenal structures of disciplinary power that de�ne what a ‘soul’ is (in Christian thinking especially) and what it means to have one and avoid a ‘sinful’ life – as a discipline of mind and body at the same time. That seems to me a clear case of noumenal, discursive power producing certain subjects and their bodies. The same holds true for the normative production of feminine bodies through discursive power, I think. How such power could ‘directly’ imprint itself on the body, as Amy argues, I don ’t see, I admit. Why would you call that form of power ‘discursive’ then? The space of reasons, as I understand it, is broad, and it includes such disciplinary discourses that seal off alternative ways of thinking and feeling – ways that Foucault ’s genealogy tried to open up, by constructing discursive counter-power. There is no discursive power operating ‘outside’ (p. 39) of the space of justi �cations which regulates ourselves. If there were, it would be sealed off from genealogical critique. In the words of a power theorist I follow here (including the point about domination): The subject, as Foucault conceives it, is constituted by forces that can be analyzed empirically in the sense that the discursive and sociocultural conditions of possibility for subjectivity in a given historically speci �c location can be uncovered through an analysis of power/knowledge regimes. But the subject has always to take up those conditions, and it is in the taking up of them that they can (potentially) be transformed. An episteme, a set of rules for discourse formations, or a power/knowledge regime sets the limits within which I can think, deliberate about ends, and act, but it does not prescribe the speci�c content of any particular thought or of any particular action (except perhaps in the most extreme cases of domination). (Allen 2008, p. 37f)

Based on such a view, I fear I must disagree with Amy ’s interpretation of ‘embodied political practices. ’ Challenges to hegemonic forms of power can take many forms, and interventions into the social space of justi �cations can of course be nonlinguistic, such as a silent sit-in or a hunger strike. We need to distinguish the mode of opposing domination from the reason for opposing it and the claims thus raised – in Martin Luther King’s terms (cited by Amy) as claims to the public ‘conscience.’ Clearly that protest was meant to expose the lack of justi �cation of the dominant forms of power and the social structures they supported. To ‘dramatize’ an issue that must not be ‘ignored,’ as King says, is exactly what can be necessary to attain justi �catory standing and no longer be denied one ’s right to justi �cation. Using such means unmasks the unreason of the other side, hence it is not, as Amy says, ‘non-reason oriented’, as it has all (good) reason(s) on its side (and knows that) and just makes the unreason of the other side obvious.



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I am not sure I really differ from Amy in thinking that we need to make an effort to try to understand how noumenal power works such that we inquire into the motivational and cognitive ‘economy’ of subjects of oppression and coercion. It seems to me far too simple to think that the oppressed either willingly ‘accept ’ their situation (even in a way that they could be blamed for such acceptance, as Amy suggests to be an implication of my view) or are purely causally directed by alien forces they are not aware of (Amy’s notion of ‘explanatory reasons’). I think both extremes are unhelpful; to understand how discursive power constitutes and frames self-knowledge and self-evaluations in no way implies that those who adopt such views are to be blamed for that, nor does it imply that there are anonymous forces at work here that telecommand subjects without them having a (possibly deluded) understanding of who they are and why they see certain justi �cations to accept, for example, a patriarchal structure or a certain order of gender relations. Again, genealogical critique would not be possible if there were no such understanding to subvert, and it would also have no material of critique. Power indeed works through producing normative reasons, and only a critique of the existing relations of justi �cation can generate the required counter-power. And as Amy cannot resist commenting on the issue of historical progress (the topic of her new book), so I cannot resist responding, as this is such an important issue. I fear I do not see what it means not to take a stance towards our past, as Amy suggests, and I am also not sure I understand how one can write a history of ‘decline,’ as she argues, or of power, if you like, if one does not precisely take such a stance. When I say that we ought to reconstruct historically the normative force of emancipatory claims, I am also in no way committed to a story of progress that paints this as the driving force of a liberating history. In fact, the story of toleration I tell in Toleration in Con � ict is a dialectical one, of some moral progress and of the progress of power and domination to �ght or contain such dynamics (see Forst 2013a, Forst and Brown 2014 on that dialectics). Furthermore, to identify emancipatory movements of the past, as any theory worth being called ‘critical ’ needs to, does not lead to a self-congratulatory moralism. It is not that ‘we’ do not have our own blind spots or would not see the noumenal power structures at work in past societies that produced what they saw as justi�cations. But there have also been con �icts in such normative orders where noumenal power was challenged as to its justi �catory quality, producing cracks in sealed orders of domination. If we had no way to relate to those con �icts and the relevant claims in a careful normative way, given our distance to the past, how could we ever try and learn from it? For example, we cannot remain agnostic with respect to the �ghts between slaves and slave-owners whenever they took place, but at the same time, we need to try and understand the justi �catory structures involved in such societies, in ancient or modern times. Historical and normative understanding cannot be separated but need to be combined in the right way, as a dialectical genealogy does. The question ‘Why?’ asks us to recognize different contexts of justi �cation and to transcend them at the same time (Tilly 2006). Note 1.

I am grateful to Erin Pineda for directing me to these passages in King’s work, and to her discussion of direct action in Pineda (forthcoming).

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Notes on contributors Amy Allen is the Parents Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of The Power of Feminist Theory (1999), The Politics of Our Selves (2008) and The End of Progress (forthcoming). Rainer Forst is professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. He is Co-Director of the Research Cluster on the ‘Formation of Normative Orders’ and of the Centre for Advanced Studies ‘Justitia Ampli�cata’. His major publications are Contexts of Justice, Toleration in Con � ict , The Right to Justi �cation and Justi �cation and Critique.


Mark Haugaard is professor in the School of Political Science and Sociology, National University of Ireland, Galway. He is editor of the Journal of Political Power and Chair of IPSA RC 36, Political Power. His most recent publications include, Haugaard and Ryan (ed.) (2012) Power: The Development of the Field ; Haugaard and Clegg (2012) (ed.) Power and Politics, 4 Volumes; and Haugaard and Clegg (ed.) (2009) The Sage Handbook of Power .

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ALLEN, ForST and HAUGAARD - Power and Reason, Justice and Domination

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