I must admit to have struggled with how to respond to Andres Henao Castro’s review of my book. On the one hand, I agree with several of Henao Castro’s objections. On the other, I see some of these concerns as fully congruent with my motivation for writing the book. I agree with Henao Castro that the Frankfurt School tradition is Eurocentric, and, indeed, “Germano-centric and andro-centric.” I agree that “European philosophy” can “no longer serve as the sole mediator” of critical theory’s efforts to integrate social-scientific knowledge in a global context. I agree too that the book’s efforts to engage with the vast and increasingly pluralistic postcolonial literature falls short of what I would ideally have liked in both scope and depth. Yet I am surprised about the extent to which Henao Castro seems to misread the book’s basic project. Notwithstanding its title, the book’s aim is quite explicitly “not to develop a full-fledged critical theory of [global justice], but rather to think about what such a project might mean” (5). As I emphasize, the global context requires us to reconceive of critical theory as “an open-ended and intercultural platform for the critique of the pathologies and injustices of global capitalist modernity” (348). The book aspires to offer a contribution to such a global critique from a perspective expressly embedded within European philosophy. But it does not claim a superior position from which to adjudicate claims within this discourse; it enters the discourse as an equal partner in a common project of theoretically enabling emancipation from global injustices.
It is true that the book does insist on a—perhaps somewhat unfashionable—Kantian point that we must understand claims about emancipation from domination as speaking to injustices: as claims about human relationships that are universally wrong. It is also true that the book approvingly charts a learning process, beginning with Horkheimer and Adorno, through which critical theorists conclude that revolutionary struggle in the Marxist sense is a too restrictive way to conceive of emancipation. Henao Castro’s objections to these claims cause me no great concern. What is of concern to me is his claim that I only pay lip service to Amy Allen’s contextualist paradigm of normativity, which borders on the disingenuous. My argument is precisely that a critical theory of global justice must integrate both a Kantian universalism and Allen’s self-problematizing critique to “denaturalize and uncover forms of exclusion and domination at the more subterranean level of subjection, such as the gender or racial norms that introduce domination into the foundations of subjectivity” (345).
I profoundly agree with Henao Castro that if critical theory is to retain intellectual relevance—and, even more emphatically, hope to redeem its emancipatory promise—in a world where European philosophy is and must be irrevocably decentered, then it must engage in “real cooperation” in “the plural and in the global”. My intention in writing this book on the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory is not to anticipate such a global cooperative engagement, which, I feel, would be presumptuous. It is, rather, to undertake the logically antecedent step of laying bare the tradition’s enduring theoretical resources, which might, when wrested from their parochial limitations, justify its legitimate place in this unfolding global conversation.
