294.2
Sociology and The Critique Of Neo-Liberalism
On all sides we’re hearing that social critique is in trouble. Nancy Fraser’s remarks about a ‘crisis of critique’ confirm Axel Honneth’s account of critique’s ‘perplexing predicament’. Peter Wagner too observes that contemporary capitalism is ‘sometimes seen to be beyond the reach of critique’. What is alarming everybody is the supposition that the project of immanent critique has been undermined by what Honneth calls the ‘neo-liberal revolution’. Immanent critique, Michael Walzer tells us, judges the present with reference to ideals that are purely internal to a particular socio-cultural context. Immanent critique is having a hard time because the normative principles and ideals internal to our social and institutional practices appear to have been resignified in capitalist friendly terms by a triumphant neo-liberalism. So neo-liberalism issues a peculiar challenge to social critique. The distortions and cultural costs of its strategy of appropriations and resignifications need to be exposed and weighed up. Burdened with disciplinary commitments to a scientific integrity, the critical sociologist struggles to meet these demands. So what, then, of Wagner’s claims about sociology’s vital contribution to a critical consciousness of modernity? My paper will briefly reconstruct his programme for a critical sociology of modernity and will argue that it falls short of the distinctive requirements that neo-liberalism places on critique. I propose to excavate normative investments that are implicit in this programme that might be marshaled to a guide a critique that weighs up the cultural costs and damages in neo-liberalism’s re-working of our normative principles and ideals.