In Search of the Concrete Universal: Evaluating Benhabib’s Theoretical Vision

Session Submission Type: Virtual Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Although she was initially known for her interpretive work on the Frankfurt School (1986) and her contributions to Feminist Contentions (1994) in political theory, over the past two decades Seyla Benhabib has turned her focus to cosmopolitanism and international law. Bringing her preexisting insights to bear on the problems involved in the politics of an increasingly globalized, interconnected work, her universalistic cosmopolitan vision has been defined by an affirmation of difference that seeks to account for the Rights of Others (2004) while also ensuring Dignity in Adversity (2011). In light of the broad range on Benhabib’s theoretical vision, this panel the different aspects of her work organized around her overarching search for a “concrete universal” that promotes pluralism by mediating the “generalized” and the “concrete other.”

Paul Linden-Retek starts by taking up Benhabib’s conception of “democratic iterations” in order to examine how this theory can ground a new form of postnational sovereignty compatible with global cosmopolitanism. Drawing on her work, Linden-Retek unveils the potential of sovereignty to serve as a principle that relates individuals and communities in distinct modes of coordination and recognition, not merely one that issues internal orders or commands without external interference. “Democratic iterations” reframes rational opinion- and will-formation as a process of remembering, reinterpreting, and reconfiguring public norms. This view ties sovereign power to neither rational order nor decisive command but instead to the faculty of judgment. This critical revision of sovereignty suggests how notions of peoplehood are developed over time through “webs of narratives” within the public sphere and, further, the vital role that refugee and asylum law plays in legitimating the democratic constitutional state. In this way, Linden-Retek links sovereignty to the issues of Exile, Statelessness, and Migration (2018) that have dominated Benhabib’s recent work.

From there, Peter J. Verovšek explores how Benhabib’s vision for a Another Cosmopolitanism (2008) builds on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt. Despite the fact that they all offer “talk-” rather than “vote-centric” (Chambers 2003) conceptions of politics, these representatives of the “communicative turn” within global cosmopolitanism also differ from each other in important ways. While Arendt builds on ideas of the public realm as the space of communicative appearances to recover a cosmopolitanism based on broad-based cooperation between local councils, Habermas instead argues for the creation of a deliberative “postnational constellation” based on continental regimes and a transnational public sphere (Öffentlichkeit). Finally, Benhabib’s contextual universalism encourages local actors to translate international norms into discourses at the local level through civic activism using the existing infrastructure of politics at both the international and domestic levels. Verovšek’s argues that Benhabib’s approach effectively mediates between the localism emphasized by Arendt and Habermas’s push for a postnational constellation beyond the confines of the nation-state.

By contrast, in her paper, Carmen Dege examines the anthropology of moral experience contained within Benhabib’s account of Situating the Self (1992), which is the foundation for her account of cosmopolitan solidarity. Although Benhabib is often read as providing an account that stakes out a middle ground between liberal, communitarian and poststructural approaches, Dege argues that seeing the world and stepping into the shoes of the other is not simply a cognitive capacity but one that involves complex psychological and motivational dimensions as well. In this way, the three standpoints of the generalized, concrete and wholly other expose the emancipatory potential of an alternative idea of solidarity that emerges against the background of our common vulnerability. Dege contends that Benhabib’s moral anthropology offers much neglected resources for the current discussion in critical theory about modernity’s so-called normative deficit.

Finally, Matthew Longo applies the concept of jurisgenerativity as articulated in Dignity in Adversity (2011) – i.e. the law’s capacity to generate norms and furnish spaces for democratic claim making – to the problem of the increased use of data (so-called “Big Data”) in state decision-making. The increased use of data in statecraft, Longo contends, is not merely dangerous as an expression of technological surveillance but also because it delimits the norm-generative capacity of law, thereby undercutting its emancipatory potential. Rather than facilitate “democratic iterations” (Benhabib) or spaces for public claim-making, state use of data restricts those spaces as well as our capacity to inhabit them. Longo concludes by outlining the problems this poses for political theory, and its ramifications for Benhabib’s corpus writ large.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• At the Borders of the Self: Democratic Iterations as Post-National Sovereignty - Paul Linden-Retek, University at Buffalo

• Models of Communicative Cosmopolitanism: Arendt, Habermas and Benhabib - Peter J. Verovšek, University of Sheffield

• Situating the Self and the Problem of Moral Motivation - Carmen Lea Dege, Polonsky Academy

• Jurisgenerativity in the Age of Big Data - Matthew Longo, Leiden University

Chair

• Anna Jurkevics University of British Columbia

Discussant

• Seyla Benhabib Yale University