Social Criticism and the Risk of Unreasonableness

Abstract

This dissertation offers a Kantian defense of unrestricted social criticism within contemporary debates in critical theory concerning methodological egalitarianism and authoritarianism. It examines social criticism as an everyday communicative activity with enlightenment and moral progress as ends. By showing that social critics can not only fail to realize those ends, but also undermine them and thereby lapse into malpractice, it argues that if social criticism’s ends require that the activity be unrestricted, as Kant and his successors indicate, promoting its ends requires accepting rather than avoiding the risk of malpractice. To substantiate this risk, it traces a tension in the Kantian framework, in which the ends of social criticism require critics to proceed both with and without respect for persons. The dissertation offers a program called revisionary autonomism to productively navigate this tension. Revisionary autonomism takes a temporalized, open-ended relation to the question of whether or not to enact respect in given episodes of social criticism, and advocates for courage and humility so as to mediate between the fearlessness of Marx’s methodologically authoritarian, ruthless critique and the modesty of Allen’s contextualist methodological egalitarianism.