Hermeneutics, Citizenship, and the Public Sphere

Roberto Alejandro is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

"This is an important and insightful book. Alejandro fuses recent debates between liberals and communitarians and between postmodernists and their critics, as well as between Gadamer's hermeneutics and critical theory, with important literature on the notions of community and citizenship from the perspective of the broad hermeneutical tradition. This synthesis throws fresh light on the work of Dewey, Rorty, Gadamer, Habermas, Arendt, Baudrillard, and others, and makes a significant contribution to the importance of recent work on citizenship for social theory and public life." — Robert Hollinger, Iowa State University"Immensely useful for scholars interested in democratic theory and the impact of continental philosophy on it. The best critique of Rorty I've seen recently, and very revealing on Baudrillard. I found it very suggestive and helpful for my own work on ideology, consciousness, and democratic theory." — Philip Green, Smith College

• Acknowledgments Introduction: Citizenship and the Aleph Chapter 1. Models of Citizenship and Hermeneutics 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Citizenship as universality and as a legal construction 1.3 Citizenship as neutrality 1.4 Citizenship as communality and participation 1.5 Citizenship as amelioration of class conflicts 1.6 Citizenship as self-sufficiency 1.7 Citizenship as a hermeneutic endeavor Chapter 2. Citizenship, Irony, Adriftness: Richard Rorty's Hermeneutics 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Pragmatism and historicity 2.3 Contingency and politics 2.4 Metaphysical "foundations" and historical ones: A critique of Rorty's conception of history 2.5 Conversation and Rorty's ideal citizen 2.6 Irony and pluralism 2.7 Irony, solidarity, or why reading books is not enough 2.8 Conclusion Chapter 3. Citizenship and Gadamer's Hermeneutics 3.1 Understanding, interpretation, language 3.2 Citizenship and dialogue 3.3 Historicity and universality 3.4 Phronesis, techne, solidarity: Gadamer's analysis of the modern polis 3.5 Hermeneutics and the limits of conversation Chapter 4. Toward a Hermeneutic-Historical Consciousness 4.1 Hermeneutics and memory 4.2 A hermeneutic-historical consciousness 4.3 Hermeneutics and a minimalist conception of the good 4.4 Replies and answers Chapter 5. Hermeneutics and the Limits of Difference 5.1 Difference and the critique of universality 5.2 The confusion of the West 5.3 The differend: Victims and the fate of phrases 5.4 The Impossible Consensus 5.5 Negotiations, ruses and the odd couple: Kantianism and paganism 5.6 Justice or the triumph of paganism 5.7 The limits of difference Chapter 6. The Quest for Community and the Quest for Glory: John Dewey's and Hannah Arendt's Visions of the Public Sphere 6.1 The public: Democracy as community life 6.2 The crisis of the political 6.3 Action, politics, and mass society Chapter 7. Communication and the Public Sphere: The Case of Habermas 7.1 Introduction 7.2 The public sphere and the ideal speech situation 7.3 Psychoanalysis and communication 7.4 Distorted communication and the Leninist temptation 7.5 Critique, praxis, emancipation Chapter 8. Play vs. Simulacrum: A Hermeneutic Conception of the Public Sphere 8.1 Introduction 8.2 The masses and the end of the political: The case of Baudrillard 8.3 Masses, resistance, apocalypse 8.4 Play and the political 8.5 Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index