Books by Chad Kautzer
Pragmatism has been called "the chief glory of our country's intellectual tradition" by its suppo... more Pragmatism has been called "the chief glory of our country's intellectual tradition" by its supporters and "a dog's dinner" by its detractors. While acknowledging pragmatism's direct ties to American imperialism and expansionism, Chad Kautzer, Eduardo Mendieta, and the contributors to this volume consider the role pragmatism plays, for better or worse, in current discussions of nationalism, war, race, and community. What can pragmatism contribute to understandings of a diverse nation? How can we reconcile pragmatism's history with recent changes in the country's racial and ethnic makeup? How does pragmatism help to explain American values and institutions and fit them into new national and multinational settings? The answers to these questions reveal pragmatism's role in helping to nourish the fundamental ideas, politics, and culture of contemporary America. Contributors include Mitchel Aboulafia, James Bohman, Robert Brandom, David Kim, Eduardo Mendieta, Lucius T. Outlaw, Jr., Max Pensky, Richard Rorty, Tommie Shelby, Shannon Sullivan, Robert Westbrook, and Cynthia Willett.
Articles and Book Chapters by Chad Kautzer
Handbook of Political Discourse, 2023
Karl Marx’s critical theories of power, history, class, and emancipation have had a significant i... more Karl Marx’s critical theories of power, history, class, and emancipation have had a significant influence on (socio-political) discourse analysis, from those who engage in multidisciplinary social critique, to those who advocate a structuralist approach or even self-identify as ‘post-Marxist’. To understand this influence, I begin with Marx's understanding of ideology as untruth, the immanent nature of his critique, and his materialist methodology, including its methods, motivating interests, and metaphysical and epistemological commitments. I discuss the influences of G. W. F. Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach in some detail, as they help us understand the context of Marx’s theorizing as well as explain the tensions in his work that are generated as he attempts to distance himself from these influences over time. I conclude with a discussion of the Frankfurt School, explaining how expanding the scope of their investigations brought new methods, new normative foundations, and new addressees for their critiques. This shift also involved the recognition that discourse could serve as a normative ground for critique as well as play a more active and autonomous role in processes of social formation and reproduction than previously thought. This is particularly evident in the communicative turn in Jürgen Habermas’s work, which has influenced critical discourse studies generally and the discourse-historical approach in particular.
boundary 2 review, 2020
We are often shocked by the brazen lies and then confounded and demoralized that the autocrat pay... more We are often shocked by the brazen lies and then confounded and demoralized that the autocrat pays no political price for them. “The need to pay constant attention to the lies is exhausting,” writes Masha Gessen in Surviving Autocracy, “and it is compounded by the feeling of helplessness in the face of the ridiculous and repeated lies.” This feeling of helplessness is understandable. However, if we remember that epistemic authoritarianism offers not only “alternative facts,” as Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway called them, but an alluring sense of belonging, vindication, and superiority, then we can manage our expectations and identify forms of resistance.
http://www.boundary2.org/2020/07/chad-kautzer-trump-public-health-and-epistemic-authoritarianism/
Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association Issue 9.1 (Spring 2020), 2020
The politicization of U.S. gun culture since the 1970s has popularized the idea that individual f... more The politicization of U.S. gun culture since the 1970s has popularized the idea that individual freedom and security is dependent upon the reclamation of traditionally defined sovereign powers. We increasingly hear individual and popular sovereignty invoked as justification for armed vigilantism, reminding us of a time when extra-legal violence was regularly employed to sustain the private tyranny of racialized rule. In this article, I outline how the exercise of popular sovereignty is a social relation of rule often involving extra-legal forms of violence, which regularizes unequal levels of vulnerability and security among various groups. I then address how the so-called sovereign subject, thought to be at the root of popular sovereignty, is conceptually contradictory and practically self-defeating. Conceptually, popular sovereignty emerges only at the moment of its alienation, i.e. retroactively, thus making the recuperation of the sovereign subject an infinitely receding and ultimately unfulfillable promise. In practice, attempts to return to a supposed pre-political condition of personal sovereignty in order to secure individual freedom involves dismantling the very social conditions that enable such freedom in the first place.
The Cambridge Habermas Lexicon, edited by Amy Allen and Eduardo Mendieta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 313-314
Habermas identifies the analysis of forms of integration in postliberal societies as one of the m... more Habermas identifies the analysis of forms of integration in postliberal societies as one of the major tasks of the Institute for Social Research under Max Horkheimer’s directorship. Postliberal societies emerge from the state interventionism of, for example, National Socialism, welfare state mass democracy, and bureaucratic socialism. In these societies, the boundaries that characterized nineteenth-century liberal capitalism – between the constitutional state, private market economy, cultural sphere, and a public sphere in which the needs of civil society are articulated and communicated to public authorities – have been blurred or altogether collapsed. Since the concepts and categories
of Marxism were specifically attuned to the differentiations of liberal capitalism, the
challenge for Frankfurt School theorists has been to revise them in light of postliberal dedifferentiation.
The Cambridge Habermas Lexicon, edited by Amy Allen and Eduardo Mendieta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 260-262
Habermas’s critique of mass culture reflects the influence of Frankfurt School theorists Herbert ... more Habermas’s critique of mass culture reflects the influence of Frankfurt School theorists Herbert Marcuse, Leo Löwenthal, Max Horkheimer, and, in particular, Theodor Adorno. In earlier work, his unsparing analysis incorporates their narrative of decline: the rapid descent from the heights of bourgeois art, which stimulated cultured audiences to critically entertain new forms of thought and social life, to the mass-produced commodities of popular culture that mitigate reflection and provide consumers with little more than immediate and distracting entertainment. Although Habermas does not completely give up this position in this later work, he will determine it to be “too simplistic.” His development of a model of intersubjectivist communicative reason will preclude him from viewing the ubiquity of mass culture as a justification for forsaking reason and thus altogether abandoning an enlightenment project that once animated Critical Theory.
The Cambridge Habermas Lexicon, edited by Amy Allen and Eduardo Mendieta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 263-265, 2019
Habermas developed a sharp critique of mass media in his early work (Structural Transformation of... more Habermas developed a sharp critique of mass media in his early work (Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962 [1989b]) and “Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article” (1974a [1964])). In both texts, he traces the emergence of the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) as a bourgeois sphere of rational-critical discourse within which public opinion about the needs of society is formed and conveyed to government authorities. As an essential component of modern democracies, these critical discussions of common concerns ideally resist the influence of any authority beyond the “authority of the better argument.”
The Cambridge Habermas Lexicon, edited by Amy Allen and Eduardo Mendieta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 613-615, 2019
Habermas first encountered Marcuse in 1956 when he lectured on material from Eros and Civilizatio... more Habermas first encountered Marcuse in 1956 when he lectured on material from Eros and Civilization at a conference marking the hundredth anniversary of Sigmund Freud’s birth, and the experience left a lasting impression. In a personal letter to Marcuse in 1978, Habermas testified to its impact: “Your lectures guided me to the discovery of a new continent! I distinctly remember my total amazement in seeing that there were people who studied Freud systematically, who took Freud seriously.” In 2011, he again wrote of how these lectures “electrified me like scarcely any other lecture before or since.” It was a pivotal moment for Habermas. Having just completed his dissertation in Bonn, he had moved to Frankfurt to study with Horkheimer and Adorno, but quickly became frustrated. In addition to the tensions with Horkheimer, who considered him too left-wing, Habermas identified what he called two missing links in Critical Theory: “the link connecting contemporary philosophy (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, etc.) to the work of the Frankfurt School, and the link from Frankfurt theory to the questions of political practice.” Marcuse was not well known among German students at the time, for Horkheimer and Adorno had sought to keep the journal of the early institute, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, out of the public eye and student hands. His encounter with Marcuse was therefore something of a revelation, providing Habermas with the missing links: “Then I read you – and met you – and found both: the full context of philosophy after Bergson… and wonderfully profound political engagement in spite of pessimism.”
Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City, 2020
The Occupy movement is an example of how social forces can produce social spaces and, conversely,... more The Occupy movement is an example of how social forces can produce social spaces and, conversely, how social spaces can afford new possibilities for social relations and political identities. Urban spaces often serve as part of the means of production – for goods as well as subjects – or are designed as a means of social control. Occupy emerged in late 2011 and rapidly grew into a large national, and subsequently international, social movement critical of neoliberalism and representational politics – both of which were experiencing crises in legitimacy after the financial crash of 2008. It was not, however, a protest movement insofar as it did not campaign for particular policy changes or petition the government or corporations with a list of demands. Its politics were rather prefigurative and thus embodied the kinds of social relations and direct democratic participation it desired more broadly, such as decision-making through popular assemblies and the collective occupation of a particular place, typically in city centers. In larger cities, the occupations became sprawling encampments with a sophisticated and creative infrastructure that could sustain basic services for hundreds, if not thousands, of people. In smaller occupations, where it was difficult to sustain an encampment, spaces were appropriated for public assemblies, deliberations, and working groups. In this chapter, I sketch the general contours of the Occupy movement and the international and national tendencies that informed the ways it sought to generate new spaces and democratic practices. I then examine the ways in which Occupy was a concrete response, not only to a deep economic recession and austerity programs, but also to failures in political representation, the privatization of the public sphere, and the suffering that financialization and the rapid growth of debt had created. I conclude with some observations about the legacy of Occupy.
Comparative Literature and Culture 23:3, 2019
Hannah Arendt’s On Violence (1970) is a seminal work in the study of political violence. It famou... more Hannah Arendt’s On Violence (1970) is a seminal work in the study of political violence. It famously draws a distinction between power and violence and argues that the latter must be excluded from the political sphere. Although this may make Arendt’s text an appealing resource for critiques of rising political violence today, I argue that we should resist this temptation. In this article, I identify how the divisions and exclusions within her theory enable her to explicitly disavow violence on one level, while implicitly relying on a constitutive and racialized form of violence on another. In particular, Arendt leaves legal and state violence presumed, but untheorized, focusing her critique instead on dissident action, especially that of the Black Power movement. Any analysis that incorporates Arendt’s conceptual distinctions is therefore susceptible to reproducing a political theory that neglects state violence in the service of White rule, yet charges those who resist it with breaching the peace. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3551&context=clcweb
Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy (Special Issue: Marx from the Margins - A Collective Project), 2018
The notion of ‘educating the educator’ appeared as part of Marx’s posthumously published Theses o... more The notion of ‘educating the educator’ appeared as part of Marx’s posthumously published Theses on Feuerbach (1845), which criticizes the materialism of fellow Left Hegelian Ludwig Feuerbach for being merely “contemplative” and one-sided. Although the eleventh thesis continues to be the most famous, Marx’s third thesis arguably provides more insight into his critical project and the history of self-criticism within the Marxist tradition. In this brief article, I identify three senses of Marx’s call to educate the educator: the methodological, theoretical, and pedagogical.
Boston Review, 2018
Published by Boston Review on Feb. 1, 2018 http://bostonreview.net/race/chad-kautzer-political-ph... more Published by Boston Review on Feb. 1, 2018 http://bostonreview.net/race/chad-kautzer-political-philosophy-self-defense
"To develop a critical theory of community defense, however, we need to move beyond the rhetoric of rights or the idea that all self-defensive violence is quasi-natural or nonpolitical. The self-defense I discuss in this essay is political because the self being defended is political, and as such it requires both normative and strategic considerations. This project seeks to articulate the dynamics of power at work in self-defense and the constitution of the self through its social relations and conflicts."
Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense, 2017
In this chapter, I do not focus on the question of whether self-defensive violence is justifiable... more In this chapter, I do not focus on the question of whether self-defensive violence is justifiable, but rather on why it is political; how it can transform self-understandings and community relations; in what contexts it can be insurrectionary; and why it must be understood against a background of structural violence. To develop a critical theory of community defense, we need to move beyond the rhetoric of rights or the idea that all self-defensive violence is quasi-natural or non-political. The self-defense discussed here is political because the self being defended is political, and as such it requires both normative and strategic considerations.
The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory, 2017
The early Frankfurt School's theoretical tendency is best described as Western Marxism, while its... more The early Frankfurt School's theoretical tendency is best described as Western Marxism, while its institutional origin was the Institute of Social Research (Institut für SoziaIforschung), founded in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1923. Marx's influence on the early Frankfurt School was profound, uneven, and largely filtered through a revived Hegelian Marxism that broke with the economistic and mechanistic doctrines of the Second International ( 1889-1916). From the beginning, the members and financiers of the Institute explicitly understood its research program as Marxist, although there was no general agreement about what it meant to be Marxist. A few years before the Institute's founding, Georg Lukacs wrote: "Great disunity has prevailed even in the 'socialist' camp as to what constitutes the essence of Marxism," and who has "the right to the title of , Marxist'" (Lukacs 1971: 1). The competing Marxist tendencies in the early twentieth century informed both the internal development of the Institute of Social Research and the contours of Western Marxism more generally....
In the following, I trace Marx's influence on the development of the early Frankfurt School, making explicit the Marxist dimensions of its cultural critique, its dialectical, historical, and materialist methods, as well as the role of praxis and class in its critical social theory. I begin by outlining the general characteristics of Western Marxism, before contrasting them with the deterministic doctrines of the Second International and Soviet Marxism. I then examine the Marxist heritage of the Institute of Social Research's influential and programmatic texts of the 1930s, beginning with Horkheimer's inaugural address of 1931. Although I briefly discuss the work of Institute members such as Henryk Grossmann, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm, my focus is primarily on the work of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse.
One of the most innovative developments in twentieth-century phenomenology can be found in the de... more One of the most innovative developments in twentieth-century phenomenology can be found in the decolonial thought of Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), a surrealist poet, Hegelian-Marxist theorist, and communist politician from Martinique.1 He was among the first to adapt G. W. F. Hegel’s dialectical and phenomenological methods to the struggle against white supremacist norms and French rule in the Antilles. In his essays and poetry, Césaire produces decolonial critiques of coloniality with thunder and concision. Drawing upon an intersubjective conflict model of subject formation, Césaire equates colonialism with “thingification” or the complete denial of social recognition. This deformed intersubjective relation not only reifies the colonized, he argued, but also dehumanizes the colonizer. Césaire’s project was to transcend this logic and cultivate an insurgent subjectivity—an anti-assimilationist concept of négritude—that is self-determining and possesses the creativity to constitute a cultural home for itself. Although Frantz Fanon would critically develop these dimensions of Césaire’s thought—namely, his insurgent understanding of subjectivity as well as his phenomenological critique of whiteness and colonialism—it was Césaire’s explosive texts that inaugurated the field of decolonial phenomenology.
In the following, I begin with a discussion of methodology, method, and the interests that inform our choices about them, before turning to the historical conditions and interests that occasioned decolonial phenomenology as a form of resistance grounded in négritude. Césaire’s revolutionary poetry and decolonial critical theory uniquely combined—creolized—surrealist aesthetics, phenomenology, and a critique of reification. Before Césaire directly encountered Jean Hyppolite’s translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, his critiques of racism and colonialism had already appropriated Hegelian contours through an engagement with André Breton’s Surrealist Manifestos (1924 and 1930) and the general Hegelian and Marxist milieu of Paris in the 1930s. I conclude by examining these contours in Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939), Discourse on Colonialism (1950), and A Tempest (1969).
This is the first text in a series titled "Dispatches on Turkey". The English version was publish... more This is the first text in a series titled "Dispatches on Turkey". The English version was published on May 31, 2016. The Turkish translation was published in BirGün, a Turkish daily, on June 1, 2016. (The links to both version are included here) This special series for the American Philosophical Association Blog features posts by an international group of academics and is edited by Chad Kautzer, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Lehigh University. The interviews and analyses of recent political developments seek to express solidarity with those facing persecution and authoritarianism in Turkey as well as identify ways in which we can support them. Correspondence: [email protected]. English version: http://blog.apaonline.org/2016/05/31/dispatches-on-turkey-academics-and-authoritarianism/ Turkish version: http://www.birgun.net/haber-detay/turkiye-de-akademisyenler-ve-otoriteryanizm-114168.html
"Marx’s theories and historical materialist methodology—his unique combination of praxis and poiē... more "Marx’s theories and historical materialist methodology—his unique combination of praxis and poiēsis—continue to inform critiques of capitalism and the practical strategies of emancipatory social movements today. In the following, I take up those most relevant to critical resistance, beginning with Marx’s phenomenology of labor or practical activity and his hermeneutics of value, which deal with alienation and commodity fetishism, before turning to the concepts of use-value, exchange-value, and surplus value. These concepts will provide us the building blocks of Marx’s larger theory of capitalism, in which labor is the source of value and at the root of the dialectical formation of class and class conflict. This inevitable social antagonism between classes means, Marx argued, that the only path to emancipation is the revolutionary overturning of the conditions of capitalism in its entirety. Only this could transcend the dialectical opposition defining the social structure of class, and thus dissolve class exploitation."
This is Chapter Three, "Feminism and Queer Theory" of Radical Philosophy: An Introduction (Routle... more This is Chapter Three, "Feminism and Queer Theory" of Radical Philosophy: An Introduction (Routledge, 2015). Endnotes are not included. About the book: "In this concise introduction, Chad Kautzer demonstrates the shared emancipatory goals and methods of several radical philosophies, from Marxism and feminism to critical race and queer theory. Radical Philosophy examines the relations of theory and practice, knowledge and power, as well as the function of law in creating extralegal forms of domination. Through a critical engagement with the history of philosophy, Kautzer reconstructs important counter-traditions of historical, dialectical, and reflexive forms of critique relevant to contemporary social struggles. The result is an innovative, systematic guide to radical theory and critical resistance."
Radical Philosophy: An Introduction (Paradigm/Routledge), Jan 30, 2015
This is Chapter 4 of Chad Kautzer, Radical Philosophy: An Introduction (Routledge, 2015). About t... more This is Chapter 4 of Chad Kautzer, Radical Philosophy: An Introduction (Routledge, 2015). About the book: "In this concise introduction, Chad Kautzer demonstrates the shared emancipatory goals and methods of several radical philosophies, from Marxism and feminism to critical race and queer theory. Radical Philosophy examines the relations of theory and practice, knowledge and power, as well as the function of law in creating extralegal forms of domination. Through a critical engagement with the history of philosophy, Kautzer reconstructs important counter-traditions of historical, dialectical, and reflexive forms of critique relevant to contemporary social struggles. The result is an innovative, systematic guide to radical theory and critical resistance."
Hegel acknowledged that states are compelled to colonial expansion in order to accommodate the st... more Hegel acknowledged that states are compelled to colonial expansion in order to accommodate the structural effects of a capitalist system that sets modern property right in motion. Hegel did not, however, acknowledge the origins of modern right in European colonial practices themselves, for the expansionary activities of European states pass without comment in his narrative of modern right’s emergence in his Philosophy of Right, Phenomenology of Spirit, and Lectures on the Philosophy of History. In this article, I situate European colonial practices within the development of modern right, freedom, and jurisdiction in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit; argue that the need to justify jurisdictional expansion was pivotal in the development of modern subjective right and thus should have been included in the Phenomenology; and support this conclusion with two developments in natural rights theory—in the works of Francisco de Vitoria and John Locke—that emerge from European colonial activity. The result is an emendation to Hegel’s philosophy of European (colonialist) history.
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Books by Chad Kautzer
Articles and Book Chapters by Chad Kautzer
http://www.boundary2.org/2020/07/chad-kautzer-trump-public-health-and-epistemic-authoritarianism/
of Marxism were specifically attuned to the differentiations of liberal capitalism, the
challenge for Frankfurt School theorists has been to revise them in light of postliberal dedifferentiation.
"To develop a critical theory of community defense, however, we need to move beyond the rhetoric of rights or the idea that all self-defensive violence is quasi-natural or nonpolitical. The self-defense I discuss in this essay is political because the self being defended is political, and as such it requires both normative and strategic considerations. This project seeks to articulate the dynamics of power at work in self-defense and the constitution of the self through its social relations and conflicts."
In the following, I trace Marx's influence on the development of the early Frankfurt School, making explicit the Marxist dimensions of its cultural critique, its dialectical, historical, and materialist methods, as well as the role of praxis and class in its critical social theory. I begin by outlining the general characteristics of Western Marxism, before contrasting them with the deterministic doctrines of the Second International and Soviet Marxism. I then examine the Marxist heritage of the Institute of Social Research's influential and programmatic texts of the 1930s, beginning with Horkheimer's inaugural address of 1931. Although I briefly discuss the work of Institute members such as Henryk Grossmann, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm, my focus is primarily on the work of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse.
In the following, I begin with a discussion of methodology, method, and the interests that inform our choices about them, before turning to the historical conditions and interests that occasioned decolonial phenomenology as a form of resistance grounded in négritude. Césaire’s revolutionary poetry and decolonial critical theory uniquely combined—creolized—surrealist aesthetics, phenomenology, and a critique of reification. Before Césaire directly encountered Jean Hyppolite’s translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, his critiques of racism and colonialism had already appropriated Hegelian contours through an engagement with André Breton’s Surrealist Manifestos (1924 and 1930) and the general Hegelian and Marxist milieu of Paris in the 1930s. I conclude by examining these contours in Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939), Discourse on Colonialism (1950), and A Tempest (1969).