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. By bringing the two into conversation, I seek to unite their distinct insights. I believe that a Fromm-Marcuse synthesis can enable a ‘polycentric and multilateral’ diagnosis of the ‘pathological normalcy’ ( Fraser and Honneth, 2001 : 209) and offer a productive way for Frankfurt School social research to progress. In this chapter, I demonstrate that Marcuse’s account offers
most explicit about his investment in ‘social pathology’. For Fromm, the ‘pathological normalcy’ of capitalism must be central to the Frankfurt School’s research agenda, and his conceptual apparatus is explicitly constructed to enable the diagnosis and disclosure of social pathologies. Yet Fromm does not provide easily operationalisable avenues for applied social research; his
Critical theory once offered a powerful, distinctive approach to social research, enabling sociologists to diagnose the irrationalities of the social world across institutions and forms of thought, even within the subject’s deepest desires. Yet, with the work of Axel Honneth, such analytical potency has been lost. The ‘domestication’ of critical theory stems from the programme’s embrace of Honneth’s ‘recognition-cognitivist’ understanding of social problems; where all social maladies are understood to lie, ultimately, within the head of social subjects and within the intersubjective relationships they enact. This book explores the manifold limitations of this dominant understanding of social pathologies and builds towards an alternate theoretical infrastructure, drawn from a marriage of insights from Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. While Honneth’s critical theory leads to researchers exploring all social problems as ‘pathologies of recognition’, a return to Fromm and Marcuse reminds critical theorists that power precedes subjectivation and that a wide range of pressing social problems exists which are invisible to the recognition framework. As such, this book urges critical theorists to once again think beyond recognition.
theory is arriving late to these discussions. There is an increasing space and urgency for ‘thicker’ social critique and clear scope for an exploration of the ‘pathological normalcy’ of the current conjuncture. Today’s world is crying out for a critical theory of society which points towards avenues for immanent-transcendence. Critical theory has so
the given social conjuncture on the basis of their mass ‘democratic uptake’, Fromm advanced a ‘science of man’, capable of determining the objective conditions which enable a flourishing existence. The ‘pathological normalcy’ of advanced industrial society was thus held to sustain, and to further entrench, an objectively suboptimal form of life. In keeping with the Hegelian
a neoliberal-apologist justification for the socially devastating market order. In direct contrast, I argue that Fromm’s understanding of capitalism as a pathological normalcy offers a superior foundation for social research. The central intervention provided by this book is therefore explicitly social theoretical . I provide sympathetic reconstructions of displaced social theories, and highlight
‘extremism’ and ‘radical right’. For Mudde, extremism is opposed to democracy in toto while ‘radical’ positions are anti-liberal but still accept a minimalist understanding of democracy as election-based procedure. Mudde's populist radical right here coincides with contemporary understandings of ‘illiberal’, often applied to figures like Viktor Orbán in Hungary. 11 Mudde proposes instead a ‘paradigm shift’ to ‘pathological normalcy’ that would acknowledge that populist radical right
prose, the academic is interpolated by bourgeois ideology, accustomed to what Fromm ( 2010 [1991]) termed a ‘pathological normalcy’. One can thus understand Rousseau’s methodological innovation in The Second Discourse , his turn to a fictive anthropology. This functions to enable a ‘disclosing critique’ (see Honneth, 2000 ); in Fromm’s ( 1963 [1955]: 14) words, it
Parsonian functionalism than to Adornian critical theory. While Fromm ( 2010 [1991]) claimed that we lived in a ‘pathological normalcy’, for Honneth the norms dominating today serve to promote liberty. Honneth is encouraging us to take a leap of faith, to follow him in believing that without public support for the dominant norms which structure social institutions, radical
personal psychodynamics and family dynamics. Joining the EDL is not an ‘end point’ – the formation of the individual subject as part of an extreme right fringe of society that the latter tolerates as a ‘pathological normalcy’ of democratic Everyday trajectories of activism75 society (Mudde, 2014: 8) – but one dimension of largely ‘normal’ lives and one that shifts in its importance to individuals as life circumstances change. Using life-history interviews with thirty-six extreme right activists in the Netherlands (1996–98), Linden and Klandermans (2007) suggest there