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The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment

Online ISBN:
9780231527286
Print ISBN:
9780231153805
Publisher:
Columbia University Press
Book

The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment

Albena Azmanova
Albena Azmanova
University of Kent
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Published online:
19 November 2015
Published in print:
3 April 2012
Online ISBN:
9780231527286
Print ISBN:
9780231153805
Publisher:
Columbia University Press

Abstract

Theories of justice are haunted by a paradox: the more ambitious the theory of justice, the less applicable and useful the model is to political practice; yet the more politically realistic the theory, the weaker its moral ambition, rendering it unsound and equally useless. Brokering a resolution to this “judgment paradox,” the book advances a “critical consensus model” of judgment that serves the normative ideals of a just society without the help of ideal theory. Tracing the evolution of two major traditions in political philosophy—critical theory and philosophical liberalism—and the way they confront the judgment paradox, the book critiques prevailing models of deliberative democracy and their preference for ideal theory over political applicability. Instead, it replaces the reliance on normative models of democracy with an account of the dynamics of reasoned judgment produced in democratic practices of open dialogues. Combining Hannah Arendt's study of judgment with Pierre Bourdieu's social critique of power relations, and incorporating elements of political epistemology from Kant, Wittgenstein, H. L. A. Hart, Max Weber, and American philosophical pragmatism, the book centers its inquiry on the way participants in moral conflicts attribute meaning to their grievances of injustice. It then demonstrates the emancipatory potential of the model of critical deliberative judgment it forges and its capacity to guide policy making.

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