Dr Neal Harris

There is a growing literature suggesting that the digital economy is taking us out of capitalism. While this manifests most notably as a diagnosis of ‘digital feudalism’ or ‘techno-feudalism’, a differing voice is McKenzie Wark, who suggests we have entered an entirely new mode of production altogether: ‘vectoralism’. This paper historicises and theorises our current conjuncture in relation to the potential multiplicity of modes of production, and the materiality and imperialism of telecommunication infrastructures. We approve of Wark's development of new concepts, rather than turning to ahistorical regurgitations like ‘neo-feudalism’. However, we argue that the mode of production lens is not adequate to trace what we consider as more granular changes and that it risks packaging old wine in new bottles. For example, Wark's vectoral claims remain grounded in infrastructures such as undersea cables that are used by corporations and states as strategies of legal and economic imperialism reminiscent of the 19th-century world order. Instead of examining this topic through a mode of production lens, we contend that these phenomena are better traced through a processual (rather than functional) and socially determined (rather than economically determined) method of historical materialism. In this regard, we adopt an approach closer to that of Thompson and Political Marxists, such as Brenner and Wood. To support our argument, we turn to wider Marxist theory on the mode of production, which we then anchor in empirical works from contemporary critical infrastructure and communication studies.

While not primarily a social theorist in the classical sense, E.F. Schumacher’s interdisciplinary thought helped galvanise ecological social theory and the ecological movement more broadly. In this article we introduce a special issue of the European Journal of Social Theory dedicated to engaging with E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful on its 50th anniversary. We provide both an overview of his life and work before locating Small is Beautiful within both its contemporary context and within today’s social theoretical literature. As we show, Schumacher was a fierce critic of capitalist modernity and its ‘gigantist’ tendencies. As we discuss below, he advocated a metaphysical turn in economics, the implementation of intermediate technology, and a reorientation of social practices in line with a more ecologically-attuned political economy. 

The cooperative firm has long been championed as a vehicle for democratising the economy, with radical cooperatives dating back to the 1830s. Our paper unites considerations from the study of worker cooperatives with key insights from first generation Frankfurt School Critical Theory. This conversation sheds light on two enduring debates within the cooperative literature, the degeneration thesis and the spillover thesis. While the degeneration thesis suggests cooperative are ultimately doomed to failure, the spillover thesis suggests that the experience of democratic control within cooperatives has a progressive function, which pushes beyond the cooperative itself. There has not been agreement within cooperative studies on the validity of either thesis, yet the debate on both has raged for many years. By turning to first generation Critical Theory we are able to bring new insights into these conversations. The early Frankfurt School placed a primacy of the subjectivity of social actors, arguing that capitalism serves to impact the consciousness, rationality, and depth psychology of subjects, so as to acculturate them to market societies. By exploring this in conjunction with the literature on cooperatives, we are able to add further weight to the degeneration thesis, and to demand further nuance and concessions from advocates of the spillover thesis. Ultimately, the paper stresses the lack of importance placed to date on subjectivity with cooperative studies and argues that if cooperatives are to play a vital role in the democratic transformation of the economy, this is a lacuna which needs to be remedied.

In this paper we argue that E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful offers important insights for contemporary social theory. In particular, we focus on the merits of his use of 'meta-economics' and of 'scale' as means for advancing ecological social critique today. While we are sympathetic to Schumacher's approach we are mindful of the limitations to his theoretical imagination and commence our paper acknowledging his partsan metaphysics and insensitivty to global political dynamics. To resolve this, we demonstrate that the central critical insights Schumacher provides can be substantially extricated from these problems. Our task here, therefore, is a critical reconstruction of Schumacher's approach to social-ecological critique, which we claim offers the potential to shape contemporary social theory, both within, and beyond, critical political ecology.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, capitalism has returned as a major concept within the social sciences. While this has led to many important interventions, there is yet to be a clear, operationalisable definition of the concept. Possessing such a definition is important, both for assessing the merits of the recent literature, but also in response to ‘capitalist realism’, the societal and academic malaise which impedes the imagination of socio-economic alternatives. To think ‘beyond capitalism’ requires a clear understanding of what one is trying to transcend. As such, we need a definition of capitalism which serves to both encompass its multiple varieties, but circumscribed enough to remain operationalisable. Capitalism must therefore be theorised as rooted in a clear and manifest series of economic logics, however these need to be viewed as open to variation and transition. In this paper we thus review existing definitions of capitalism and offer our own preferred approach. We present a definition of capitalism based on an economic logic consisting of seven elements: (1) free enterprise and the competitive market, (2) the pursuit of profit and its private appropriation, (3) wage labour and the production of commodities, (4) property rights, (5) the financial infrastructure of money and investment that makes possible credit and debt (6) a highly variable degree of state regulation and (7) a propensity for growth as the productive re-investment of profit. The economic logic of capitalism interacts with other institutional orders of society to produce the overall shape of capitalism.

The Covid-19 pandemic has intensified interest in alternatives to neoliberalism. One proposal which has been increasingly discussed by both academics and activists is the implementation of a Universal Basic
Income (UBI). This would typically see all citizens awarded a regular cash payment, without conditionality attached. While UBI thus deserves considered attention from sociologists, as of yet critical theorists have
not offered an extended engagement with the proposal. In this paper I provide exactly such a critical theoretical perspective on Universal Basic Income, subjecting the approach to an extended critique. When viewed through the perspective of critical theory, UBI emerges as a more problematic approach to social change, failing to offer what its most enthusiastic progressive proponents promise: ‘a capitalist road to
communism’. Rather, in this article I argue that, when viewed through the lens of critical theory, universal basic income appears likely to further entrench, rather than disturb, the neoliberal social formation.

We argue that Gorz’s work offers a nuanced engagement with alienation that is instructive for contemporary social theory. In keeping with Gorz’s broader politics, we contend that the utility of his framing of alienation derives from his insistence that progressive critique must challenge the ideal of productivism. We start the paper by presenting a sympathetic reconstruction of Gorz’s understanding of alienation. Next, we explicitly detail the strengths his approach carries for furthering sociological research today. We then reinforce this point by arguing that Gorz’s work offers particularly valuable theoretical resources for contemporary Frankfurt School Critical Theory, in which the study of alienation has been somehow hampered by the ascent of ‘recognition theory’. While not sharing all the methodological commitments of first-generation Critical Theorists, Gorz was well versed in Frankfurt School scholarship and is therefore an apposite interlocutor to engage ‘third-generation’ Critical Theory. Gorz’s insights are thus shown to be important for furthering contemporary social theory, and in particular, for helping to combat the unsustainable productivism of neoliberal capitalism.

An Oxford Bibliographies entry.

Unlike the first generation of critical theorists, contemporary critical theory has largely ignored technology. This is to the detriment of a critical theory of society – technology is now a central feature of our daily lives and integral to the contemporary form of capitalism. Rather than seek to rescue the first generation’s substantive theory of technology, which has been partly outmoded by historical developments, the approach adopted in this article is to engage with today’s technology through the conceptual apparatus offered by the early Frankfurt School. This rationale is guided by the conviction that the core ideas of critical theory still offer a sound basis for assessing the nature of technology today. Through a reconstruction and engagement with some of the core
concepts of first-generation critical theory, as well as the work of Bernard Stiegler and Andrew Feenberg, we can arrive at a more robust theory of technology, capable of critically interrogating the role of technology in contemporary society.

This article focuses on the critical cosmopolitan aim of transcending sociology’s provincial outlook, which mistakenly universalizes Western societies’ historical experiences and normative aspirations. The authors argue that a change in perspective, from sociology to social theory, is crucial in this regard. While a sociological inflection carries a primary investment in the analysis of changes cosmopolitanism brings to the social world, social theory addresses the ontological and epistemological features that these changes precipitate. To demonstrate this, the authors offer a condensed reconstruction of critical cosmopolitan sociology, presenting Beck’s foundational formulation, outlining three main criticisms it faces and alternative programs stemming from them, and demonstrating how Delanty’s immanent-transcendent approach overcomes these limitations. To conclude, the authors address a crucial onto-epistemological challenge facing contemporary cosmopolitan scholarship, namely, how to mediate between the particular and the universal.

Erich Fromm’s analysis of ‘pathological normalcy’ offers promising social-theoretical resources to help transcend the contemporary, ‘domesticated’, diagnosis of social pathologies. This article commences by briefly tracing the numerous limitations of the current orthodoxy, epitomised by the recognition-cognitive ‘pathologies of recognition’ approach. A sympathetic reconstruction of Erich Fromm’s diagnosis of pathological normalcy is then presented as a promising palliative. The strengths of Fromm’s social-theoretical framework are then outlined: Fromm’s scholarship presents a structure through which objectively inadequate and contradictory social conditions can be diagnosed, while emphasising their important connections to the social-psychological pathologies which sustain them. The efficacy of Fromm’s approach is then defended against post-modern and social-constructivist critiques. This article thus supports the rehabilitation of Fromm’s work within the sociological mainstream as an important antidote to the ‘domesticated’ framing of social pathology which continues to dominate contemporary scholarship. = L’analyse d’Erich Fromm de la ‘normalité pathologique’ offre des ressources socio-théoriques prometteuses pour nous aider à transcender le diagnostic contemporain, ‘domestiqué’, des pathologies sociales. Cet article commence par tracer brièvement les nombreuses limites de l’orthodoxie actuelle en la matière, très bien illustrées par l’approche par reconnaissance cognitive des ‘pathologies de la reconnaissance’. Une reconstruction favorable du diagnostic d’Erich Fromm de la normalité pathologique est ensuite présentée comme un palliatif prometteur. Les forces du cadre socio-théorique de Fromm sont ainsi exposées : les connaissances constituées par Fromm forment une structure à partir de laquelle on peut diagnostiquer les conditions sociales étant objectivement inadaptées et contradictoires, tout en soulignant les connections importantes les reliant avec les pathologies socio-psychologiques sur lesquelles elles reposent. L’efficacité de l’approche de Fromm est ainsi défendue contre les critiques post-modernes qui lui sont faites et contre celles émanant du constructivisme social. Cet article soutient donc la réhabilitation du travail de Fromm au sein du courant sociologique dominant en tant qu’il constitue un antidote important au cadre ‘domestiqué’ que constitue la pathologie sociale et qui continue de dominer la littérature académique contemporaine.  

While the framework of social pathology remains a crucial tool for critical social theorists, there is confusion and debate surrounding the precise nature of the heuristic. The core argument of this article is that while the diagnosis of social pathology harbours radical potential as a critical device, recent developments have led to the ascendancy of a restrictive, recognition-cognitive understanding. I argue that this has displaced alternate, more radical framings. To illustrate the changing face of the heuristic, this article opens by articulating the merits and demerits of five predominant conceptions of social pathology. The second section elucidates the turn to increasingly view social pathology in a manner compatible with just one of these five framings. By drawing on, and extending, the existing critical literature, I seek to demonstrate the relative limitations of such an understanding. Throughout this analysis, I argue for the continued relevance of social pathology diagnosis, the need for sustained critical scholarship, and the dangers of embracing too readily the turn to an exclusively recognition-cognitive understanding of social pathology.

For generations, critical social theorists have turned to the framing of ‘pathology’ to provide a theoretical infrastructure for their critique. Such an approach famously undergirds much of the Frankfurt School’s canonical work. Axel Honneth, current chair of the Institute of Social Research, continues this tradition. While Frankfurt School approaches have largely tied pathology diagnosis to a critique of historically mediated reason, a plurality of alternate conceptions exist. With the ascendancy of an intersubjective approach to critical social theory, the pathologies of the social have increasingly been comprehended as ‘pathologies of recognition’. Advocates of such a framing point to the ease of establishing an immanent basis to their critique, and of the empirical evidence supporting the need for recognition. Yet, today’s academy is increasingly spilt between those who embrace a ‘pathologies of recognition’ framework, and those who consider the development a ‘domestication’ of the Critical Theoretical tradition. This special issue brings together contributors from both sides of this divide. While the optimal framing of social pathology remains contested, the contributors to this collection are committed to furthering forms of social critique which transcend the limited liberal framings of injustice and illegitimacy.