American Pragmatism and the Frankfurt SchoolFootnote ²⁸

My argument that the future of Frankfurt School-inspired CIRT involves the recovery of its American Pragmatist influences begs the question of what happened to create the 'family drama' that separated these two modes of thinking. Horkheimer argued that American Pragmatism was like Positivism. It was merely the ‘subjective reason’ (Verstand) of ‘the ordinary man’, which ‘is essentially concerned … with the adequacy of procedures for purposes more or less taken for granted and supposedly self-explanatory’. As ‘subjective reason’, Pragmatism attached ‘little importance to considering whether espoused purposes are reasonable’.Footnote ²⁹ At its extreme, subjective reason can be a form of moral nihilism, enabling governments to better implement ‘a new barbarism’ (which of course led Horkheimer to leave Nazi Germany).Footnote ³⁰ In its American context, Pragmatism was seen as serving the capitalist system. It enabled subjects to mitigate their problems without problematising what ‘objective reason’ (Vernuft) tells them they need to do if they are to fully realise themselves. Pragmatism ‘formalized reason’ so that an activity, including art and recreation, was valued ‘only if it serves another purpose’, which in the capitalist system meant ‘yielding to manipulation’Footnote ³¹ and replenishing the subject’s ‘working power’.Footnote ³² Pragmatism thus helped objectify human subjects, turning them into tools of the system. In these circumstances, life was not living.Footnote ³³ Emancipation required a different philosophy. It would be based on the negative critique of common-sense assumptions about the socio-economic system. That would expose the particular interests those assumptions served and how they repressed the human subject. Philosophical Pragmatism, in other words, had to be rejected in favour of Critical Theory.Footnote ³⁴

Horkheimer’s understanding and criticism of American Pragmatism was based primarily on a reading of William James’s work, and the claim that truth is found in statements that are useful to believe.Footnote ³⁵ John Dewey is cited in the Eclipse of Reason but only with respect to his thoughts on this Jamesian argument.Footnote ³⁶ Deeper engagement would have caused Horkheimer to reflect on Pragmatism’s own critique of reason, which Dewey saw as potentially reflecting the epistemic preferences of a privileged intellectual class.Footnote ³⁷ It would also have qualified the manner in which the ‘subjective reason’ of ‘the ordinary man’, or what contemporary vernacular might refer to as ‘the lived experience’, was valuable.Footnote ³⁸ Indeed, classical Pragmatists valued the lived experience because it was a way of ‘testing’ the philosopher’s (or any other elite’s) claim to know what was good for people.Footnote ³⁹ This kind of knowledge was subjective, but Pragmatists were not inviting subjects to unthinkingly accept common-sense understandings of political ends; nor were they blind to the way power constructed those understandings.Footnote ⁴⁰ They were encouraging philosophers and ordinary people to reflect together on the experiential consequences of their truth claims, to positively defend those claims if they ameliorated the lived experiences of practice – including its indirect (or public) consequence – and to negatively critique those claims if they did not.Footnote ⁴¹ A theory that did not reflect on material consequences risked irrelevance; or worse, it risked justifying (absolute) force as the means of achieving the (philosopher’s absolute) truth (at ordinary people’s expense).Footnote ⁴²

Dewey called his approach ‘experimentalism’; and as the ‘permanent deposit’ left by Hegelian dialectics, it might easily have been interpreted differently by Horkheimer.Footnote ⁴³ As Wheatland puts it,

Despite these commonalities Freud’s ‘narcissism of small differences’ prevailed.Footnote ⁴⁵ Horkheimer interpreted experimentalism as uncritical problem-solving and the Frankfurt School separated from American Pragmatism; at least, that is, until Habermasian discourse ethics drew on American Pragmatism and its conception of democracy as a form of social learning, which was itself influenced by Charles Peirce’s claim that truth emerged from an ever-expanding, more inclusive, community of inquiry.Footnote ⁴⁶ After that it was possible to argue, as Arvi Särkelä does, that ‘many critical theorists are pragmatists and vice versa’.Footnote ⁴⁷ I return to the Pragmatist relationship to Habermas’s Critical Theory below. Before that, I need to establish my argument that Deweyan Pragmatism is relevant to the future of CIRT not just because it protects the Habermasian ‘baby’ but because it also demonstrates the value of negative critique in theory and practice.

That can be done in two ways. Firstly, Pragmatists collapsed the theory/practice binary and, in its most demanding form, ‘vocationally’ committed to a grounded form of political engagement, which included negating those exclusionary power structures that define which problems need to be solved and how to solve them.Footnote ⁴⁸ Part of this was Dewey’s critique of traditional education methods. Dewey argued that to encourage learning teachers needed to be sympathetic to (i.e. include) the subject’s experiential starting point rather than impose abstract knowledge on them. Where traditional education merely habitualised subjects, Dewey’s progressive method tried to nurture critical capacity.Footnote ⁴⁹ This approach was inspired by Jane Addams’s work at Hull House, which brought together the working-class, African-American, immigrant families of Chicago in an attempt to encourage new thinking. It was a very engaged form of critical praxis (i.e. a process of reflection and action directed at changing society).Footnote ⁵⁰ Contrary to Horkheimer’s claims about the ‘bourgeois savant’, therefore, Dewey and Addams did unify the activities of the (problem-solving) scientist with the (critical) citizen.Footnote ⁵¹ Again, the difference is a small one of emphasis. Where Deweyan Pragmatism and Frankfurt School theories shared a fallibilist ‘sense of their own artificiality’,Footnote ⁵² and thus a commitment to ongoing inquiry, the latter’s emphasis on the negative weighs more heavily and thus protects the former from complacency.

The second way to demonstrate the value of negative critique in Pragmatist thought is to examine Dewey’s written work, especially The Public and Its Problems and Critique of American Civilization. Here, we see an engaged, political, almost partisan, negative critique of the power structures of American capitalism. In The Public, Dewey accepted that economic change had left communities alienated from a political system seemingly controlled by the formalised reason of the market. In this context, the public (if not reason) had been ‘eclipsed’. That, however, was not a justification for the kind of technocracy that Walter Lippmann had famously advocated.Footnote ⁵³ It was instead a reason to politically mobilise those experiencing the consequences of this new practice while being excluded from the communities of inquiry that rationalised it. Dewey called these ‘publics’, and their mobilisation was necessary if the public interest was to be rediscovered in new circumstances.Footnote ⁵⁴ To form itself in that moment a new public had to

Dewey of course did not commit to violent revolution. That would in practice lead to ‘civil war’, which would be ‘the ruin of all parties and the destruction of civilized life’.Footnote ⁵⁶ This, however, is hardly the language of someone who is unaware of how power exploits ‘subjective reason’, or someone who is politically ‘neutral’, which is how Schmid describes the Pragmatist-inspired Habermasian ethic.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the Critique, moreover, Dewey asked ‘which forces are to win’. Those ‘that are organized, that know what they are after and that take systematic means to accomplish their end, or those that are spontaneous, private and scattered’.Footnote ⁵⁸ He contrasted the ‘tightening up and solidifying of the forces of reaction’ with the rise of new voluntary associations, which he characterised as a ‘working force of liberated individualities, experimenting in their own ways to find and realize their own ends’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Again, this is not the language of someone who is neutral towards the capitalist (or any other) system. It is language that speaks to the politics of the current moment.

CIRT does not have to go back to the first-generation Frankfurt School to rediscover negative critique therefore. We find such arguments (and actions) in the work of contemporaneous Pragmatists. They combined a negative critique of problematic practices with a commitment to communication and deliberation as a means of positively reconstituting hegemonic conceptions of the public interest. This ability to combine the negative and the positive is important and speaks to the first of two reasons why CIRT might not want to go back to the first-generation Frankfurt School. Adorno’s emphasis on the value of negative critique – even to the extent we resign ourselves to living ‘less wrongly’ because we can never discover the good – is important.Footnote ⁶⁰ As noted, it prevents complacency; but even Adorno’s defenders wonder if it is ‘insufficiently motivating’.Footnote ⁶¹ The argument offered in defence of negativity, moreover, potentially blurs the normative problem of identifying a wrong and the political problem of responding to it. We might not need deliberative discourse to know that certain forms of suffering are normatively wrong,Footnote ⁶² but surely deliberative discourse – and its ameliorative promise – is integral to the political process that effectively mobilises collective action and prevents or corrects that wrong. Negative critique stops progressives becoming complacent, but Pragmatist meliorism also protects them against despondency and resignation, which can of course give way to the cynicism (and instrumental reasoning) of political Realism rather than the hope (and emancipatory reasoning) of Critical Theory.Footnote ⁶³

A second, related, reason why CIRT might not want to return to first-generation Frankfurt School thinking is its reputation for being elitist and ‘aloof from politics’.Footnote ⁶⁴ This perception emerged as a response to Adorno and Horkheimer’s criticism of popular culture in capitalist America, which they saw as exploiting the masses instead of emancipating them from objectively repressive structures.Footnote ⁶⁵ The emphasis Adorno placed on an avant-garde form of art was, of course, anti-authoritarian. The dissonances it created acted as a negative critique of Stalinist and Fascist aesthetics.Footnote ⁶⁶ As ‘an experimentor, open-endedly defying dogma’,Footnote ⁶⁷ moreover, the avant-garde artist might even be described as a Deweyan Pragmatist. The problem was that this kind of critical consciousness was focused on the artist (and theorist), not on their audiences. Nurturing a broader understanding was not its purpose. That did not mean it had no political effect, however. Understanding this form of critique required access to the gallery and its theory of art; and when those that did not have such access were represented as having false consciousness, it created the impression of intellectual hubris and elitism.Footnote ⁶⁸ That is grist for the populist’s mill. Indeed, a kind of anti-intellectualism is evident in today’s right-wing discourse, and that is a problem to the extent it enables a dangerous form of post-truth politics. This is why I caution against a return to first-generation Frankfurt School thinking.

Dewey, of course, shared a concern about the disabling effects of culture, but he transposed his ‘pedagogic creed’ onto a very different analysis of art. For Dewey, a critical culture capable of social learning could be nurtured but that involved breaking down (rather than setting up) the social hierarchies that separated art and the everyday. This Emersonian approach encouraged as art any activity that ‘vivified’Footnote ⁶⁹ life and ‘refreshed attitude(s) toward the circumstances and exigencies of ordinary experience’.Footnote ⁷⁰ The goal was to celebrate modes of expression that recognised marginalised emotions as both valid and reflective, and to educate people’s sentiments rather than pander or dictate to them.Footnote ⁷¹ Popular art was not necessarily anaesthetising, therefore. It could nurture a form self-realisation, growth, and agency, enable a politically significant negative critique, and, by nurturing a sense of solidarity and collective will, positively reconstruct social norms and structures. Adorno’s concern – that in search of popularity such an artist (or theorist) would ‘submit to the demand of what presently exists and thereby, despite collective appearances, forget the social demands [of negative critique] which come out of his own aesthetic sphere’ – is important.Footnote ⁷² It reminds us of what Pragmatists accept is a matter of political judgement. By retreating to the ‘solitary works’ of their ‘own aesthetic sphere’, however, Adorno’s artists/theorists simply avoid that dilemma in a way that ‘abrogate[s] political utility’.Footnote ⁷³ They may remain loyal to their own truth, but they do little to change the fact that it is – as Dewey reminds us – the ‘practical men’ or the ‘men of executive habits’ that shape social truths.Footnote ⁷⁴

Critical international relations theory and its ‘crisis of critique’

For Habermas, the first generation of Frankfurt School theory got to a position that was contradictory and dangerous. In making this argument, Habermas focused on Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which he described as ‘an odd book’ that offered an ‘astoundingly’ oversimplified image of modernity.Footnote ⁷⁵ In Dialectic, Adorno and Horkheimer had continued their attack against the ‘blindly pragmatized’ reason of capitalist society.Footnote ⁷⁶ Reason, they claimed, had diverted the repressed from the truth, and art had numbed the spirit of critique. As the servant of power, the age of enlightenment had become what it was meant to transcend: myth. For Habermas, this argument was ‘paradoxical’. This is because Adorno and Horkheimer could still (somehow) claim to know the existence of an emancipatory truth even if all they offered was the scepticism of negative critique.Footnote ⁷⁷ This ‘aporia’Footnote ⁷⁸ was dangerous because in merely exposing power as the servant of subjective reason it offered nothing to divert power from its path. There was no way of moving through Nietzsche’s state of nihilism, therefore; no reason to work towards emancipation and growth instead of (mythical) authenticity and domination.Footnote ⁷⁹

Habermas insisted, however, that modernity was more complex than ‘the cramped optics’ of Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis.Footnote ⁸⁰

Habermas did not reference Dewey in this passage, but its understanding of ‘science’, ‘democratic will formation’, ‘identity formation’, and ‘basic aesthetic experiences’ is clearly Deweyan, an influence Habermas acknowledged elsewhere.Footnote ⁸² Habermas also ended his lecture on the Dialectic with an indication of how the Frankfurt School would build on modernity’s complexity to recover the link between reason and emancipation. As modernity was more complex and pluralistic than Adorno and Horkheimer had imagined, Habermas shifted our attention to argumentation. In this space, immanent critique was ‘entwined’ with communicative theory. The negative and positive were two sides of the same coin. Argumentation would never be entirely free from power, but ‘the spell of mythic thinking’, and the hold it had over Adorno and Horkheimer, could only be broken by grounding argumentation in communicative ethics.Footnote ⁸³ This too was influenced by classical American Pragmatism, in particular the Peirceian idea that learning and truth was found in the consensus of ever-expanding communities of inquiry. Mead’s symbolic interactionism also featured strongly. It was Peirce who established ‘not only the ideal moment of concept formation, which establishes generality, but also the idealizing moment of forming true judgements, which triumphs over time’;Footnote ⁸⁴ and it was Mead who provided the ‘basic conceptual framework of normatively regulated and linguistically mediated interaction’.Footnote ⁸⁵

From Schmid’s perspective, however, this Habermasian turn simply exchanged one ‘cul-de-sac’ for another.Footnote ⁸⁶ The problem was not necessarily Habermas’s adoption of the philosophical Pragmatist’s consensus (as opposed to correspondence) version of truth, it was the way he ontologically separated the ‘system’ – e.g. the market or (in IR terms) anarchy – from the ‘lifeworld’ – e.g. the ‘ensemble of cultural resources, values and traditions’.Footnote ⁸⁷ While the latter was characterised by communicative action, the former remained governed by instrumental action. This led to a damaging shift in methodology. Critical Theory (and subsequently CIRT) would concentrate on the normative task of finding – through discourse ethics – an intersubjective consensus to anchor the public interest. A commitment to communicative rationality would resist the system’s ‘colonisation’ of the lifeworld, but, by leaving the instrumental rationality of the ‘system’ untouched, the Habermasian bifurcation of capitalism and democracy cut short the Frankfurt School’s promise.Footnote ⁸⁸ For Schmid, the Habermasian turn offered a reified and depoliticised account of systems (e.g. capitalism, international anarchy) as norm-free, re-naturalised and necessary social orders.Footnote ⁸⁹

On my reading, CIRT’s crisis and the frustrations of the historical moment lie not in the Habermasian turn, but in a methodological failure to build on its praxeological implications, a failure that I think recent developments in IR – especially the research agendas around Practice Theory and Ontological Security Studies (OSS) – can help us address.Footnote ⁹⁰ I expand on that in the following sections. Before that, however, I complete this section by making three points: first, the ontological bifurcation that Schmid identifies in Habermasian theory was not as stark as he argues, and the Deweyan concept of ‘publics’ (Habermas preferred ‘social movements’) can return CIRT’s methodological focus on to the role praxis plays at the ‘seams’ of system and lifeworld.Footnote ⁹¹ Second, Deweyan Pragmatism can also help us distinguish publics worthy of political support from groups who are committed to a negative critique but not to the ‘reconciliation’Footnote ⁹² of competing positions, nor to the idea that the public interest emerges from an inclusive and deliberative process. Third, the Pragmatist focus on problem-solving as a form of ameliorative action means we can give more weight to experts with technical problem-solving knowledge of systems while simultaneously holding a critical theory that ‘bursts open encapsulated expert cultures’.Footnote ⁹³

Habermas was clear that a ‘system’ based on instrumental reason and a ‘lifeworld’ based on communicative reason did not work separately. They mutually constituted ‘society’ and there was nothing inevitable about how they did that. There was indeed a risk that the lifeworld ‘taken by itself … remains blind to causes, connections, and consequences that lie beyond the horizon of everyday practice’, but that is not how Habermas conceived the distinction.

In other words, whether the system is anarchy, capitalism, or the climate, the implication is the same: the system should work for the ends that emerge from the lifeworld that is (or should be) guided by communicative ethics. The complexity of modern systems demands technical knowledge (e.g. strategic studies, economics, climate science), but in contrast to Adorno and Horkheimer, Habermas insisted we need not ‘infer linear dependencies’ in the direction of knowledge and influence. Technical knowledge of the system could influence the lifeworld, but the reverse was also true. The norms that emerge from the lifeworld could influence the system.

There was therefore nothing in Habermas’s ontological bifurcation that, as Schmid puts it, naturalised the system and put it beyond politics. In fact, the direction a society took hinged on the ability of ‘social movements’ to ‘blow apart expert cultures’ with a form of negative or immanent critique. At this point, I think there is added value in the Deweyan concept of publics, and how it enables theorists to identify social movements with emancipatory intent. That in turn helps Pragmatists avoid the kind of neutrality that Schmid associates with Habermasian-informed CIRT. As noted, Deweyan publics were engaged in negative critique of existing practice and the expert cultures that underpinned them. But what separated ‘publics’ from ‘private’ associations was that their negative critique was combined with a creative approach that sought to reconcile otherwise fixed and competing positions.Footnote ⁹⁶ Publics represented particular interests that were being overlooked by power, but they did so in ways that complemented the search for the public interest.Footnote ⁹⁷ This is not at odds with the Habermasian approach, but it is perhaps more explicit in the concept of ‘publics’. That concept encourages CIRT to associate not simply with a neutral process of inclusion and deliberation, it demands CIRT substantively disassociate from (and politically oppose) movements whose negative critique takes the form of ‘dogmatic cynicism’ and is designed to empower a particular (i.e. fixed and exclusionary) subjectivity.Footnote ⁹⁸

Dewey was critical of institutions that did not ‘conscientiously reflect’ on the consequences of accepted truths; and, as noted, he was committed to a pedagogy and politics that broke down the exclusionary hierarchies that prevented learning. For these reasons, Deweyan thought has been associated with populism, but it can also be read as rejecting populism on the grounds that it is unsuited to solving the problems it highlights. Dewey captured this in The Public when explaining what James Bohman later called the ‘cognitive division of labour’ in the Pragmatist conception of democracy.Footnote ⁹⁹ A democratic ethos of inclusion was ‘educative’, Dewey wrote, because ‘it forces a recognition that there are common interests [in associated living], even though the recognition of what they are is confused’. The need ‘it enforces of discussion and publicity’, or what Habermas would later refer to as communicative ethics, ‘brings about some clarification of what they are’. Indiscriminate inclusion leading to the marginalisation of systemic expertise will not, however, emancipate subjects because that reduces the likelihood of solving practical problems. Knowledge that improved the lived experience was, in other words, co-constituted. ‘The man who wears the shoe’, Dewey wrote, ‘knows best that it pinches and where it pinches.’ But, he added, ‘the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The populism that gives voice to the lived experience of the ‘ordinary’ person is thus well placed to offer a negative critique, but just as Pragmatism is critical of technocracy, it is also critical of populism. Hilary Putnam captured this when recalling Dewey’s ‘epistemological justification for democracy’. The ability to ‘criticize, is fundamental. But thinking for oneself does not exclude – indeed it requires – learning when and where we seek expert knowledge.’Footnote ¹⁰¹ We might conclude this section therefore by saying CIRT does need negative critique to ‘blow apart’ the complacency of ‘expert cultures’, but it should also recall that technical expertise has a particular contribution to make in the communicative process that reconstructs, in a more humane way, what has been blown apart. On this basis, I think the CIRT that is informed by Pragmatism distinguishes itself clearly from the negative critique of contemporary right-wing populists. The latter too easily portrays technical experts as being part of an out-of-touch and exploitative cosmopolitan elite because that fits its political purpose, which is to (materially and ontologically) revive, mobilise, and secure a fixed, exclusionary and (supposedly) authentic subjectivity.Footnote ¹⁰² I will now explain more specifically how Pragmatism informs a future research agenda for CIRT.

To ‘blow apart expert cultures’: practice theory and the Pragmatist critique

With this Horkheimer (albeit briefly) flipped his critique of traditional theory to shine a spotlight on those critical thinkers who limited their discoveries to exposing ‘the relationship that exists between intellectual positions and their social location’. To expose common sense or hegemonic assumptions behind problem-solving theory, and to give theory a more emancipatory purpose, was not enough.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Critical Theory’s ‘real function’ could only emerge when the ‘concrete historical situation’ was studied empirically in a way that stimulated change. Furthermore, it would always be the case that ‘society must come to grips with nature’. The ‘intellectual technology’ of traditional, problem-solving theory would never be irrelevant, therefore. On the contrary, technical expertise had to be developed ‘as fully as possible’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Critical Theory and Problem-solving Theory were two sides of the same coin in other words; and Critical Theory had to be ‘as rigorous as the deductions in a specialized scientific theory’ because ‘each is an element in the building up of a comprehensive judgement’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

I take five points from this and the preceding discussion. First, that Horkheimer, like Deweyan Pragmatism, saw the need for an epistemic division of (expert and everyday) labour if knowledge, and the way society treated it, was to be emancipatory. Neither Traditional nor Critical Theory was ‘self-sufficient and separable from struggle’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Second, Horkheimer’s Critical Theory, again like the Pragmatist theory of Dewey and Addams, shared a commitment to praxis, i.e. a vocational commitment that combined theoretical reflexivity with a grounded, engaged, and activist commitment to the empirical research of systems.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Third, Habermas, like Dewey, was able to move beyond the scepticism of Adorno and Horkheimer not, as Schmid claims, by only concentrating on the lifeworld and theoretical task of discovering the public good through deliberative dialogue, but by focusing empirically on the practice of ‘expert cultures’ at the ‘seams’ of system and lifeworld.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Fourth – and this is a new point – Linklater’s later work on the evolution of cosmopolitan harm conventions was part of his commitment to a Frankfurt School-inspired critical international theory based on normative, sociological, and praxeological dimensions.Footnote ¹¹⁰ As historical sociology, this work obviously concentrated on the middle of these dimensions, but the implication is not that CIRT is guilty of system reification or of being apolitical and uncritical. The (sub-)system for CIRT (as opposed to critical political economy) is the anarchic one of sovereign nation-states, which under Waltzian neo-realism developed its own instrumental rationality. To challenge the meaning of ‘citizenship’ and ‘national identity’ in an (international/global) normative context, and to show how that critique has played out sociologically through time – as Linklater surely did – is an analysis that says something about both lifeworld and system-logics. Still, as I noted at the outset, there is reason to take seriously Schmid’s concern that in the current moment the version of CIRT that is focused on norm construction is seemingly limited to offering a form of ‘consolatory’ cosmopolitanism.

That leads to my fifth point, which I develop in this section. The real problem for CIRT is not its supposed neglect of system analysis in favour of normative theory, or its favouring of second-generation Frankfurt School analysis over its first generation. The problem is that the praxeological dimension has lacked, as Horkheimer would put it, ‘the pragmatic character of traditional theory’. CIRT has long been accused of lacking practical policy relevance,Footnote ¹¹¹ and now it (and its norm studies cousin) seem ‘hollow’ as result.Footnote ¹¹² To address that, I think CIRT should ‘reorient towards practice’Footnote ¹¹³ by following the lead of the practice turn in ‘new constructivist’ IR.Footnote ¹¹⁴ More specifically, it can focus on ‘communities of practice’, i.e. those ‘spatial-organization platforms where practitioners interact, learn and end up creating and diffusing practices and promoting their adoption by future practitioners’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ This would be a pragmatic – and Pragmatist – adjustment to the previous focus on the normative and sociological process of norm building. It would give those interested in praxeology an empirical focus for both negative and (as Conway might say) ‘reformist’ critique.Footnote ¹¹⁶

An immediate problem with this suggestion is that IR practice theory can be read as ‘traditional theory’ in the way Horkheimer used that phrase. On the one hand, its grounded focus on the everyday micro-practices of practitioners is useful in addressing the concern that the ‘grand narratives’ of contemporary CIRT are too far removed from praxeology. Indeed, some see the practice turn in IR as part of a wider Pragmatist arc for these reasons.Footnote ¹¹⁷ On the other hand, practice theory is potentially at odds with Critical Theory’s emancipatory project if it loses ‘sight of the nature of social domination’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ This is especially the case if practice theory focuses only on the struggles among practitioners to prove their ‘competence’ in performing practices, and if practice is defined merely as ‘patterned actions that are embedded in particular organized contexts'. Footnote ¹¹⁹ This approach potentially produces knowledge of a system, and how practitioners define and realise its purpose, but it does not – to repeat Horkheimer – comment on ‘whether the purposes as such are reasonable.’Footnote ¹²⁰ Indeed, Horkheimer seemingly spoke directly to this when he expressed concern about the failure to challenge the social value of technical knowledge. It ‘is one of the reasons why men who in particular scientific areas or in other professional activity are able to do extremely competent work, can show themselves quite limited and incompetent, despite good will, when it comes to questions concerning society as a whole’.Footnote ¹²¹

Why then would the focus and methods of practice theory help CIRT? It can, I suggest, make that contribution if the (lower-case) pragmatic move to focus on practice is combined with the kind of (upper-case) Pragmatist critique I described above. Indeed, I have argued along these lines in previous work with Jess Gifkins. We looked at practice theory accounts of diplomacy at the United Nations Security Council, including its approach to cosmopolitan harm conventions like the Responsibility to Protect. While we do not directly speak to CIRT, the implication is clear. The purpose of practice theory should be to critique the competence claims of systemic practitioners (e.g. Security Council diplomats) according to the norms produced by the global ‘lifeworld’.Footnote ¹²² I more recently expanded on this approach developing two normative tests to ‘blow apart’ the complacency of communities of practice. The first of these is ‘inclusive reflexivity’, which assesses the openness of communities of practice to Deweyan ‘publics’, i.e. those affected by a practice but otherwise excluded from the knowledge processes that notionally legitimises them. Whereas this acts as a form of negative critique (or what Visoka might term ‘critique as alternative’), the second test – ‘deliberative practical judgement’ – reflects the Pragmatist commitment to problem-solving (or ‘critique with alternative’).Footnote ¹²³ The emphasis on practical consequences means the Pragmatist will prudently take technical knowledge into account as it searches for that better alternative.

Together, these tests can, I suggest, inform the praxeological dimension of CIRT by addressing pressing challenges like climate change, for instance. Whether the purpose of theory is ‘emancipation’ of the human subject (as in Critical Theory), or ‘amelioration’ of the lived experience (as in Pragmatism), climate change presents a two-part challenge. The first is that the technical reason of a capitalist system, which values the exploitation of the environment and legitimises carbon-emitting practices for economic growth, contradicts the objective reason of climatologists who alert us to the catastrophic consequences of business-as-usual. The second challenge is that the technical reason of the climate system and the climatologists could conceivably colonise the lifeworld in ways that also threaten the human subject and harm the lived experience. In focusing on the communities of global practice that have emerged around the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – in particular the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Conference of Parties (COP) – I have situated Pragmatist analysis between these extremes.

After aplying the Pragmatist tests to these communities of practice for instance, I concluded that while the IPCC is a panel made up of scientific experts whose reasoning might be described as ‘traditional’, it is a community that CIRT should support, not least because its reasoning is ‘deliberative’ among people who understand the system in question (the climate), and because that acts as a counterweight against the populist claims of those subjective interests who are not so qualified. That does not mean, however, that ‘inclusive reflexivity’ is redundant in this case. If this community is to command ‘epistemic authority’, it has to be conscious of how its expert knowledge is received by those with a stake in the problem and those with an influence on problem-solving practice. This translates, for example, into a need for regional representation within a global panel of expertise.Footnote ¹²⁴ Similarly, the over-representation of the fossil fuel industry at the annual COP meetings might lead to the argument that the technical and subjective reason of the capitalist system has indeed colonised global governance. The Pragmatist implication of this is a political commitment to greater involvement of ‘publics’ – in this case social movements and industries championing sustainable growth – to balance to the power of special or ‘private’ interests.Footnote ¹²⁵

Liberal misrecognition, the new right, and CIRT’s future

Rebecca Adler-Nissen and Ayşe Zarakol argue that the rise of the populist right in the LIO’s Western ‘core’, and its non-Western ‘periphery’, can be explained by misrecognition. Misrecognition is ‘understood as the gap between an individual or group’s desired identity and how that person or group experiences being seen by others’. In this way, misrecognition ‘destabilizes’ the self’s identity.Footnote ¹²⁶ It creates ontological insecurity. To recover or achieve ‘the high status they believe they are entitled to’, right-wing movements rebel against liberal norms, which they blame for their sense of alienation.Footnote ¹²⁷ Drolet and Williams add that from this perspective the defenders of liberal norms, including much of Western academia, are part of a ‘New Class’ of administrators threatening ‘authentic’ ways of life and their social hierarchies. Drawing on the Critical Theory of, for example, Antonio Gramsci, this ‘New Right’ has successfully tapped into this sense of alienation to mobilise a ‘counter-hegemony’ against liberalism.Footnote ¹²⁸ This includes, most obviously within the Western core, Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) movement, which targets liberal norms and their defenders to make some Americans feel secure in their conservative identities. At the periphery of the LIO, it has found expression in Russian imperialism and, by invading Ukraine, its attack on liberal norms like national self-determination.

It is against this backdrop that I think Schmid’s dismissive approach toward third-generation Frankfurt School Critical Theory is unhelpful. Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition is in fact important to the future of CIRT because it speaks to this challenge.Footnote ¹²⁹ Through a recovery of Hegelian and American Pragmatist (especially Meadian) thought, Honneth took Frankfurt School Critical Theory beyond the Habermasian focus on discourse ethics and its procedural conception of deliberative democracy. His focus was on the role social recognition plays in emancipatory self-realisation. Inclusion in deliberative processes is not simply a response to the epistemological question of how to authenticate claims to know the public interest, (as discussed above), it is also a useful response to existential questions of ontological security. This is because the right to participate in the public sphere bestows social value on (i.e. recognises) those being included. In the language of ontological security studies – especially its recent (re)turn to psychoanalysis – routines that respect the rights of democratic inclusion can emancipate subjects from the anxiety that the alienated self otherwise experiences.Footnote ¹³⁰

Honneth’s Pragmatist conception of self-realisation based on mutual recognition goes beyond the civil [international] rights of human [state] subjects, however. Mutual recognition based on legal personality does not go far enough for Honneth. This is because legal personality is precisely the one shared with all other members of the [international] community. It cannot therefore recognise the self and its particular traits. To properly secure the self, subjects need to ‘assure themselves of the social significance of their individual capacities’ in the light of a community’s ‘value-conviction’. Honneth labelled this ‘esteem’.Footnote ¹³¹ Without socially endowed self-esteem, subjects will experience disrespect and ontological insecurity. This has implications for the emancipatory praxis of Pragmatist-informed CIRT. It values the practices of what Dewey called ‘extended personalities’, or those subjects who realise themselves in (international) societies that enable others to realise their selves.Footnote ¹³²

But is there a problem invoking Honneth’s Critical Theory in the current moment when its focus on esteeming otherwise repressed identities has been blamed for its own form of misrecognition and for the rise of right-wing populism? Drolet and Williams capture this when they write:

To be sure, Drolet and Williams are trying to understand the rise of the New Right, their intention ‘is not to somehow blame Critical perspectives’. That said, I think this interpretation does have a normative implication. It does not mean CIRT should dismiss Honneth’s emphasis on identity and the emancipatory value of social recognition, but it does invite us to again think about praxeology and the resources offered by the American Pragmatism of John Dewey.

A Deweyan-inspired critique of Habermasian ethics, for instance, centres on the potentially alienating consequences of an approach that abstracts truth claims ‘from the relationships of the situation’Footnote ¹³⁴ and values ‘reason’ over ‘emotion’. In this vein, Dmitri Shalin argued that Habermas’s emphasis on ‘disembodied reason’ should be contrasted with Dewey’s ‘embodied reasonableness’. Reason in the theory of communicative action is primarily taken to be consciousness, understanding, cognition 'with no obvious relation to the human body and noncognitive processes (emotions, feelings, sentiments)'. What Pragmatists call ‘experience’ had, in Habermasian theory, ‘shrivelled into verbal intellect’.Footnote ¹³⁵ This is important here because the actual consequence of this kind of communicative practice may well be the reconstruction of an unhelpful social hierarchy based on the intellectual’s misrecognition of certain groups as ‘irrational’ simply because they are ‘sentimental’.Footnote ¹³⁶ What Shalin describes as the ‘embodied reasonableness’ of Deweyan naturalism recognises the importance of emotions to human behaviours and, therefore, to solving social problems. It is less likely to deride the way sentiments, traditions, beliefs, myth (or other ‘irrationalities’) provide a sense of ontological security, and for that reason it is ‘more easily justifiable and … more expansionable’.Footnote ¹³⁷ The emphasis is on emotional and social ‘intelligence’, not reason, and that, I suggest, creates a more empathetic approach to those feeling (materially and ontologically) threatened by change.

Linklater’s CIRT was not so tied to Habermas to miss this. His emancipatory sociology traced the evolution of ethical responses that were embodied to the extent that the ‘emotions and constitution of impulses make agent compliance with social principles virtually automatic’.Footnote ¹³⁸ My focus here, however, is on the praxeological implication. My point is that if an emancipatory politics of recognition is insensitive to the emotions that accompany change and loss – if it is ‘condescending’Footnote ¹³⁹ – then it is more likely to provoke a reaction that makes it difficult for the oppressed to gain the social recognition that is sought. Jack Snyder makes a similar point.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ He notes how liberal activists critical of foreign regimes for not recognising the human rights of their citizens have not ‘paid much attention to the emotional dynamics of the targeted group, and in particular to the emotions of shame and shaming’. Moral outrage, he continues, often ‘plays into the hands of elites in a traditional power structure, drawing energy from outrage at loss of status in a way that motivates widespread popular backlash’. That leaves ‘the progressive namers and shamers farther from their goals’.Footnote ¹⁴¹

The Pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty made a similar point in relation to the emergence of identity politics at the core of the LIO. Writing in 1997, he noted how the American left’s embrace of an emancipatory identity politics could backfire if that also involved shaming those who did not share this narrative of the American identity. The task was to achieve a more inclusive America, but that would not happen if Americans were alienated by change. If that happened then:

This is an amazingly prescient statement given the re-election of President Trump, but again the Pragmatist’s point is not to blame a politics of recognition, nor to dismiss Honneth’s Critical Theory as a form of emancipatory politics relevant to the age. Honneth after all drew on the classical Pragmatist works of Dewey and Mead (as did Rorty) in formulating his theory. The Pragmatist’s point rather is to stress the importance of the means – the praxeology – by which the ontological security of self-realisation is pursued. The social change that is necessary for oppressed identities to feel recognised is no less anxiety-inducing for it being necessary. Progressive reformers will not acquire allies if they belittle that anxiety (or even – as Rorty does – use the language of ‘gains’ and ‘losses’).Footnote ¹⁴³ In such situations, Dewey’s commitment to empathy as a pedagogic tool is more likely to encourage sustainable change than the condescending stance of liberal moralism.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ It may well be that in the US case it is too late for Critical Theory and the political left to act on Rorty’s Pragmatist advice. But then, Rorty himself knew that sentimental education was in fact a generational process.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ On that basis, Pragmatism can still signpost a future for CIRT.