Introduction: Reconstituting Criticism Today

The contributions to this volume locate themselves within the contemporary crisis of philosophically grounded social criticism. At the close of the millennium we find an increasingly pessimistic mood taking hold among philosophers and political theorists who pursue their intellectual projects with the critical intentions of stimulating and supporting a progressive political agenda. Theoretical self-confidence was a notable characteristic of the socialist vision that had inspired progressive social critics for several generations. The key to an emancipated future, or a just order, was to transform the structure of political economy so as to eliminate the destructive and degrading effects of capitalist markets on human relations. But, in the wake of the collapse of state socialism, and with the emergence of a new global order where the logic of the market reigns virtually unopposed, this theoretical self-confidence has all but evaporated. As Nancy Fraser has recently remarked, one of the constitutive features of the ‘postsocialist’ condition in which we now find ourselves is ‘the absence of any credible progressive vision of an alternative to the present order’.1