Crisis Under Critique

Didier Fassin is the James Wolfensohn Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, a director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, and former chair in public health at the Collège de France. He is coeditor of A Time for Critique (Columbia, 2019), among many other books.Axel Honneth is Jack C. Weinstein Professor for the Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University and was formerly professor of social philosophy at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, where he also was the director of the Institute for Social Research. He is the author of numerous books, including Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life (Columbia, 2014).

Neither crisis nor critique can be treated wholly theoretically, abstracted from particular political and economic conditions. The approach of this book, with its highly structured, formal-intellectual organization and its insistent attention to grounded material experience, is thus admirably suited to its aims. There is constant attention to both the theoretical and the empirical. That rich specificity makes each chapter a pleasure to read, for it enables each author to capture the immediacy of crisis and the purpose that animates critique.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Heuristic of Crises: Reclaiming Critical Voices, by Didier Fassin and Axel HonnethPart I. Social Movements1. Capitalism Contested: Britain in the Aftermath of World War I, by Clara Elisabetta Mattei2. Striking a Rock with Eggs: Resistance and Repression After Tiananmen, by Rowena Xiaoqing He3. Undoing the Rule of Market Laws: Social Critique and the Making of Normative Futures, by Rodrigo Cordero4. “Layoffs Are Murder, but They Are Also Everyday Life”: A Critique of Labor and Living in the Era of Ghost Capital, by Hae Yeon Choo5. Remaking the Demos “from Below”? Critical Theory, Migrant Struggles, and Epistemic Resistance, by Robin CelikatesPart II. Intellectual Engagements6. Peace, or the Moral Economy of War: Between W. E. B. Du Bois and Sayyid Quṭb, by Murad Idris7. Personal Pronouns and Political Protest: Henry David Thoreau and Ta-Nehisi Coates as Critics in Times of Crisis, by Dieter Thomä8. Becoming Anticolonial in Northern Namibia, 1950–1954: The Emergence of Both Crisis and Critique from Everyday Interpretations, by Gregor Dobler9. How Do Technocrats Address Crises? From Structural to Humanitarian Approaches to Crises in Latin American Developmentalism, by Aldo Marchesi10. Against Crisis: Violence and Continuity in Manus Island Prison, by Anne McNevinPart III. Affected Communities11. Love Trumps Hate: Community Caretaking in an Era of Mass Deportation, by Denise Brennan12. Helping Refugees in Rural Germany: Ambivalences of Compassion, by Greta Wagner13. Toward a Theory of Climate Praxis: Confronting Climate Change in a World of Struggle, by Daniel Aldana Cohen and David Bond14. The Discovery of Contamination: Forever Chemicals and the Temporality of Critique, by David Bond15. Democracy Without Demos: The Disappearance of the Working Class and the Rise of Abstention in French Political Life, by Anne-Claire DefossezPart IV. Reflexive Perspectives16. New Technologies and the Moral Economy of White Nationalism, by Hector Amaya17. “The Only Way Out Is Through”: Anthropology as Critical Praxis in Times of Crisis, by Munira Khayyat18. Social Movements and Social Theory, by Michael Walzer19. The Invisible Rebellion: Working People Under the New Capitalist Economy, by Axel Honneth20. Conspiracy Theories as Ambiguous Critique of Crisis, by Didier FassinContributorsIndex