Justification and Critique

Towards a Critical Theory of Politics

Rainer Forst

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780745652290
  9780745652283
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745694788
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Rainer Forst develops a critical theory capable of deciphering the deficits and potentials inherent in contemporary political reality. This calls for a perspective which is immanent to social and political practices and at the same time transcends them. Forst regards society as a whole as an 'order of justification' comprising complexes of different norms referring to institutions and corresponding practices of justification. The task of a 'critique of relations of justification', therefore, is to analyse such legitimations with regard to their validity and genesis and to explore the social and political asymmetries leading to inequalities in the 'justification power' which enables persons or groups to contest given justifications and to create new ones.

Starting from the concept of justification as a basic social practice, Forst develops a theory of political and social justice, human rights and democracy, as well as of power and of critique itself. In so doing, he engages in a critique of a number of contemporary approaches in political philosophy and critical theory. Finally, he also addresses the question of the utopian horizon of social criticism.

Part I
Radical Justice

1
Two Pictures of Justice

1

At various times, human beings have made depictions of justice. She appears as the goddess diké or justitia, sometimes with, sometimes without a blindfold, though invariably with the sword and symbols of even-handedness and non-partisanship; one need only think, for example, of Lorenzetti's “Allegory of Good Government” in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. Mostly she is depicted as beautiful and sublime, yet at other times also as hard and cruel, as in Klimt's famous paintings for Vienna University (which were destroyed during the war).

Studying such representations is a fascinating enterprise.¹ However, the understanding of “picture” which informs my remarks is a different, linguistic, one. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”² A picture of this kind shapes our language in a particular way, brings together the various usages of a word, and thus constitutes its “grammar.” But such pictures can also point our understanding in the wrong direction, much as, in viewing the famous picture puzzle of a duck and a rabbit, one can see only one aspect at a time,³ or as our thinking is held captive by particular examples that lead us to make false generalizations.⁴

In what follows, I would like to discuss two ways of thinking about justice, one of which I want to argue inadmissibly limits and simplifies our understanding of justice, and indeed leads it in a wrong direction. I prefer to regard these two competing notions of justice as “pictures” because they bring together a wealth of conceptions and images, and not only of justice, but also in particular of injustice. The latter seems to be the more concrete, immediate phenomenon, being associated with stories and images of the oppressed, the wretched, and the downtrodden. Thus a “picture of justice” stands for a very general and at the same time “thick” and concrete way of thinking about justice and injustice.

2

The picture that holds our thinking concerning social or distributive justice “captive” is the result of a particular interpretation of the ancient principle suum cuique – “To each (or from each) his own” – which has been central to our understanding of justice since Plato and is interpreted in such a way that the primary issue is what goods individuals justly receive or deserve – in other words, who “gets” what. This then leads either to comparisons between people's sets of goods, and thus to relative conclusions, or to the question of whether individuals have “enough” of the essential goods, regardless of comparative considerations. Granted, these goods- and distribution-centred, recipient-oriented points of view have their merits, for distributive justice is, of course, concerned with the goods individuals can appropriately claim. Nevertheless this picture obscures essential aspects of justice. In the first place, the question of how the goods to be distributed come into existence is neglected in a purely goods-focused view; hence issues of production and its just organization are largely ignored. Furthermore, there is the second problem that the political question of who determines the structures of production and distribution and in what ways is disregarded or downplayed, as though a great distribution machine – a neutral “distributor”⁵ – could exist that only needs to be programmed correctly using the right “metric” of justice.⁶ But, according to the picture of justice I propose, it is not only essential that there should not be such a machine, because it would mean that justice would no longer be understood as a political accomplishment of the subjects themselves but would turn them into passive recipients of goods – but not of justice. This thought also neglects, in the third place, the fact that justified claims to goods do not simply “exist” but can be arrived at only through discourse in the context of corresponding procedures of justification in which – and this is the fundamental requirement of justice – all can in principle participate as free and equal individuals (as I will argue below on the basis of a discourse-theoretical interpretation of the alternative picture of justice).

Finally, in the fourth place, the goods-fixated view of justice also largely leaves the question of injustice out of account; for, by concentrating on overcoming deficiencies in the distribution of goods, someone who suffers deprivation as a result of a natural catastrophe is equivalent to someone who suffers deprivation as a result of economic or political exploitation. Although it is correct that help is required in both cases, according to my understanding of the grammar of justice it is required in the one case as an act of moral solidarity, in the other as an act of justice conditioned by the nature of one's involvement in relations of exploitation and injustice and the specific wrong in question.⁷ Hence there are different grounds for action as well as different kinds of action which are required. Ignoring this difference can lead to a situation where – in a dialectic of morality, as it were⁸ – what is actually a requirement of justice is seen as an act of generous assistance or “aid.” A critique of such a dialectic can already be found in Kant:

Having the resources to practice such benevolence as depends on the goods of fortune is, for the most part, a result of certain human beings favoured through the injustice of the government, which introduces an inequality of wealth that makes others need their beneficence. Under such circumstances, does a rich man's help to the needy, on which he so readily prides himself as something meritorious, really deserve to be called beneficence at all?⁹

For all of these reasons, it is especially important when dealing with questions of distributive justice to recognize the political point of justice and to liberate oneself from a one-sided picture fixated on quantities of goods (or on a measure of well-being to be produced by them). On a second, fuller and more apt picture, by contrast, justice must be geared to intersubjective relations and structures, not to subjective or putatively objective states of the provision of goods or of well-being. Only in this way, by taking into consideration the first question of justice – namely, the question of the justifiability of social relations and, correspondingly, how much “justification power” individuals or groups have in a political context – can a radical, critical conception of justice be developed, one which gets at the roots of relations of injustice. In short, the basic question of justice is not what you have but how you are treated.¹⁰

3

What might justify one in speaking of a misleading or “false” as opposed to a more “apt” picture of justice, given that the goods- or recipient-centred notion can appeal to the time-honoured principle of suum cuique? Is there, in contrast to this, a more original, deeper meaning of justice which the alternative picture captures more fully? In my opinion there is. Consider the very concept of justice. That concept possesses a core meaning to which the essential contrasting concept is that of arbitrariness,¹¹ understood in a social and political but not a metaphysical sense – that is, assuming the form of arbitrary rule by individuals or by a part of the community (for example, a class) over others, or of the acceptance of social contingencies which lead to social subordination and domination and are rationalized as an unalterable fate, even though they are nothing of the sort. A metaphysical conception of arbitrariness in the context of social justice would go further and aim to eradicate or compensate for all differences between persons that give them an advantage over others due to brute luck, regardless of whether these differences lead to social domination.¹² This goes too far according to the second picture of justice; justice must remain a human task aiming at non-domination, not one for the gods aiming at a world free from natural or historical contingency. Arbitrariness as domination is a human vice of injustice, contingency in general is a fact of life.

The term “domination” is important in this context, for it signifies the arbitrary rule of some over others – that is, rule without proper reasons and justifications and (possibly) without proper structures of justification existing in the first place,¹³ and when people engage in struggles against injustice they are combating forms of domination of this kind. The basic impulse that opposes injustice is not primarily one of wanting something, or more of something, but is instead that of not wanting to be dominated, harassed, or overruled in one's claim to a basic right to justification.¹⁴ This moral right expresses the demand that no political or social relations should exist that cannot be adequately justified toward those involved. This constitutes the profoundly political essence of justice, which is not captured, but is suppressed, by the recipient-focused interpretations of the principle suum cuique. The core issue of justice is who determines who receives what, that is, the question answered in Plato in terms of the ideas of the supreme goo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Sources
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: On the Idea of a Critique of Relations of Justification
• Part I: Radical Justice
• Part II: Justification, Recognition, and Critique
• Part III: Beyond Justice
• References
• Index