Political Theory

H19(c) - Ideology and Reason

Date: Jun 5 | Time: 01:45pm to 03:15pm | Location:

Chair/Président/Présidente : Timothy Berk (University of Ottawa)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Neil Hibbert (University of Saskatchewan)

Neoliberal (Ir)Rationality: Adorno, Brown, and the New Right-Wing Extremism: John Grant (King's University College), Mallory Dunlop (University of Ottawa)
Abstract: The contemporary rise of right-wing extremism within mainstream electoral politics in the West has prompted renewed interest in the early Frankfurt School's critical theory of fascism. In this article we revisit Theodor W. Adorno's thinking on the nature and causes of the post-war "new" right-wing extremism in the United States and Germany and demonstrate its relevance to understanding the contemporary popularity of the far-right. In particular, we engage with two recently published works by Adorno that have yet to receive a great deal of scholarly attention: his 1950 "Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality" and 1967 lecture titled "Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism." For Adorno, the latent potential for fascism lies in the self-contradictory nature of the social totality; that is, in the material contradiction between the ideological claims of liberal democracy to individual autonomy and the material reality of a "totalizing" system that negates such autonomy. By bringing Adorno's newly available insights into conversation with the work of Wendy Brown, we defend the contemporary relevance of Adorno's concept of material contradiction but argue that Brown's emphasis on the specific logic and effects of the governing rationality of neoliberalism is necessary to understanding fascist movements today. Adorno's concept of the self-contradictory social totality provides a framework in which the authoritarian dynamics neoliberal 'freedom' can be grasped. We focus on three central themes in Adorno's and Brown's work: 1) the exacerbation of the self-contradictions within modern capitalist societies by neoliberalism's normative project; 2) neoliberal 'freedom' as pseudo-conservatism; 3) the nihilism of the far-right.

Ghost ideologies, or what we can learn when we compare neoliberalism with other things that don’t exist: Lauchlan T. Munro (University of Ottawa)
Abstract: One of the most widely used terms in critical social science, “neoliberalism”, is a ghost ideology, i.e., an ideology lacking literature, proponents, leadership and organisation, invented by its opponents to promote the moral superiority of the inventers. Ghost ideologies are straw men. This paper seeks to apprehend the origins, evolution and current uses of “neoliberalism” in the light of two other ghost ideologies: “cultural Marxism” and “historicism”. Cultural Marxism plays a similar moralistic role on today’s political Right to that played by neoliberalism on today’s political Left. “Historicism” featured prominently in debates from the 1930s to 1950s. Using a Foucauldian archeology of ideas, this paper looks at the original meaning of neoliberalism, cultural Marxism and historicism in history and social science. We show how each of these three terms once referred in a non-pejorative fashion to actual schools of thought and communities of scholars and practitioners who used that term to self-identify. In their current ghost ideology version, critics wield each of these terms in ways that mean the opposite of the original usage, emptying the terms of their original content and obliterating their history. Common elements in all three cases include the extreme plasticity of the three concepts, the pejorative use of the terms, the moralistic tone adopted, and the absence from the debate of the accused. Following Venugopal (2015), we understand today’s use of neoliberalism as a non-rigorous way for non-economists to frame and critique economics.

Populism, Distrust, and Civil Disobedience: Susan Dieleman (University of Lethbridge)
Abstract: In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls distinguishes between civil disobedience and militant action by highlighting the presence or absence of trust: where those who engage in civil disobedience frame their opposition against the background of trust in, or fidelity to, existing legal and political institutions, those who engage in militant action have no such trust in or fidelity to these institutions. Militant actors are unwilling to accept the legal consequences of their illegal actions because they do not see the institutions they oppose to be legitimate. While Rawls had the Civil Rights Movement and opposition to the Vietnam War in mind when writing A Theory of Justice, the contemporary political context invites us to reconsider his distinctions in light of the recent rise in populist sentiment. Populism, typically defined as a political approach that contrasts “the people” to “the elite,” tends to be seen as synonymous with right-wing populism and exemplified by supporters of Trump in the United States. Recent research has shown that such right-wing populists are more likely to endorse or accept the use of violence to achieve political aims. Yet whether and to what extent populists – right-wing or otherwise – would be willing to engage in law-breaking, and/or willing to accept the legal consequences of their law-breaking activity, is entirely neglected in this research. In this presentation, I propose a theoretical framework for and highlight the expected benefits of investigating these questions.

Three Faces of Common Sense: How Common Sense Means and Matters in Left-Populism, Right-Populism, and Pre-Political Experience: Laticia Chapman (University of Alberta), Roger Epp (University of Alberta)
Abstract: There exist three major strands of thought in the scholarly literature on the political concept of “common sense.” Analysts and proponents of left-populism, drawing from Antonio Gramsci, understand common sense as “awareness born out of the concrete experience of subalternity” which provides the rough material for “effective revolutionary narratives” (Crehan 2016, 48-49). Analysts of right-populism, or who see populism as a negative political phenomenon, understand the invocation of common sense by particular actors as integral to a reactionary and anti-democratic politics (Newth and Scopelliti 2023). In Hannah Arendt’s Aristotelian- and phenomenologically-influenced political theory, common sense is something like an “extra sense…[p]ossessed by all humans” which enables us “to organize the disparate impressions received from the other five” (Crehan 2016, 43; Rosenfeld 2011). In this last meaning, common sense is part of each person’s perceptual apparatus, coming before any particular knowledge-content. Common sense is, therefore, an uncertain political term, heralding a politics of exclusion, a revolutionary politics, and the pre-political capacity to organize information so that it may be interpreted and communicated (and potentially thereby become political). This paper will examine each of these three political meanings of common sense to interrogate the political content of the words “common” and “sense”—how should we understand “sense” in the realm of politics, and how can this “sense”—whether it refers to knowledge or to a capacity for experience—be “common?” The paper’s ultimate intent is to better understand what distinguishes a revolutionary populist politics from a reactionary populist politics.