Bulletin Philosophy and Society 2023-34/2
The second issue in 2023 of the journal Philosophy and Society (Philosophy and Society 34/2) brings a thematic section The Politics of Trust: Recognition, Institutions and Social Change. Moreover, in this issue readers can find original scientific papers on the importance of interdependence and responsible epistemic behavior during crisis and on the politics of emptiness. Finally, this issue also contains two book reviews: namely, a review of Nadège Ragaru’s And so the Bulgarian Jews were saved... Researching, Retelling, and Remembering the Holocaust in Bulgaria and of Chantal Mouffe’s Towards a Green Democratic Revolution: Left Populism and the Power of Affects.
The thematic section The Politics of Trust: Recognition, Institutions and Social Change, which is the result of continued cooperation between philosophers and social theorists from the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory of the University of Belgrade (CriticLab) and the Research Group GINEDIS based at the Department of Philosophy and Society of the Complutense University of Madrid, begins with a paper by Clara Ramas San Miguel entitled “A System of Trust? Robert Brandom and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit”. In her paper, Ramas San Miguel provides an analysis of Robert Brandom’s pragmatist reconstruction of Hegel’s social philosophy and argues that Brandom’s reading of Hegel foregrounds the role of interpersonal relations in the construction of social norms and institutional reality, above all relations of interpersonal recognition.
Srđan Prodanović complements Ramas San Miguel’s analysis in his “Intuitions, Trust, and Social Change in Times of Crisis” through an insightful consideration of the relationship between trust and intuitions. Namely, Prodanović argues that interpersonal trust cannot be reduced to either purely cognitive or purely affective attitudes, but is a hybrid phenomenon which intertwines cognition and affect. He argues that personal intuitions are phenomena of a similar hybrid nature, distinguishing between “inferential” and “holistic” intuitions, and shows that the latter are able to “interconnect far elements of experience in a radically new manner”.
Following the same theoretical intuitions, Igor Cvejić presents an innovative argument about the role of trust in the formulation of new norms in conditions of societal uncertainty. In “Trust and ‘Being Moved’ as Forms of Engagement in Situations of Uncertainty”, indeed, Cvejić builds on Bennett Helm’s argument about the constitution of plural agents through mutual “calls of trust” to argue that, in a situation of pronounced societal uncertainty, even though people cannot rely
on existing norms that regulate calls of trust, they still issue such mutual calls in the form of recognizing each other as “responsible” agents; that is, as agents who understand the significance of the societal crisis in light of their shared circumstances of mutual dependency. Cvejić complements this argument about “trust without norms” with the concept of being moved which represents a complex emotion that provides a stimulus to the mentioned trustee in a situation of crisis to “reorganize her hierarchy of priorities and values”.
In his “Recognition as a Counterhegemonic Strategy”, Marjan Ivković analyzes the nature of cultural hegemony in post-Fordist capitalism and the prospects for transformative action that are created within it. Building on the work of Nancy Fraser and Wendy Brown, Ivković reconstructs the post-Fordist historic bloc as a contradictory unity of several axes of articulation that gives rise to a “paradox of engagement/disengagement” and a certain “promise of political agency” created within this historic bloc that remains unfulfilled. He ultimately suggests that the political left must formulate a “politics of respect” that could actualize the “promise of political agency” created within the post-Fordist historic bloc.
Andrea Perunović continues the line of hegemony analysis by focusing on the economistic reduction of the phenomena of credit, debt and money within market-liberal discourses in his paper entitled “Credit, Debt and Money as Social Institutions of Trust”. Perunović, namely, formulates a critique of ideology in the form of an expanded, cultural-institutionalist understanding of these phenomena. Relying on Marcel Hénaff’s distinction between “constitutive debt”, “eventdebt” and “cosmic debt”, and Michel Aglietta’s and André Orléan’s heterodox conception of money as not just a medium of exchange but a “regulative agent of social belonging”, Perunović argues that Aglietta’s and Orléan’s three stages of trust in money can be mapped onto Hénaff’s three types of debt. He thereby draws a complex picture of how social reality is constructed in a monetary economy through the establishment of generalized relations of trust.
In “Which King, Whose Sovereignty? Notes on the Nation-State in Times of Globalization”, Clara Navarro Ruiz presents a diagnosis of the effects of financialized capitalism on democratic nation states which shows that the ideal of democratic popular sovereignty is progressively undermined by the processes of “transnationalization” and “diffusion” of sovereignty that characterize economic globalization. Any attempt to transform financialized capitalism, Navarro argues, will have to start from the fact of transnationalization rather than a “return to the nation-state” and formulate innovative and persuasive alternatives to the seductive ideal of governance.
Nuria Sánchez Madrid reconstructs Kant’s cosmopolitan right as a non-ideal normative conception that holds some potential for informing politics today in her paper “Kant’s Trust in the Political Value of Labor and Global Mobility: A Non-Ideal Account of Cosmopolitan Normativity”. Sánchez Madrid argues that, even though Kant’s cosmopolitan right is not a theory of a “cosmopolitan lawgiver”, it relies on a conception of “cosmopolitan mobility” that should be regulated through the informal norm of the “common possession of the earth”.
Finally, Lydia de Tienda Palop and Jacobo Huerta Vega formulate a nuanced critique of Tzvetan Todorov’s perspective on global security in the aftermath of the Iraq War. In their paper “Security and Freedom: A Complex Alliance”, namely, de Tienda Palop and Huerta Vega rely on Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach to argue that freedom and security – which they understand as multidimensional phenomena – do not have to be seen as mutually antithetical if we endorse the premise that, in a longer-term perspective, there is a dialectical relationship between the two in which each is the precondition of the other. Freedom, understood as “the factual possibility of a dignified life”, can only be achieved in a setting of security, while security can only exist in a world in which all subjects are able to lead a dignified life.
Nikolina Smiljanić’s paper, “The Importance of Interdependence and Responsible Epistemic Behavior in Crises”, emphasizes the importance of interdependence and epistemic responsibility of individuals within society and policymakers who bear a particularly heavy epistemic responsibility during the COVID-19 pandemic and possible future crises.
In their “Phraseology ‘without Meaning’: Politics of Emptiness”, Aleksandar Ostojić and Aleksandar Čučković examine the use of phraseology without meaning in politics by focusing on bureaucratic language that shapes our political reality. Starting from Ernesto Laclau’s understanding of the “empty signifier” and the necessary function it has in the foundation of the system (especially a hegemonic one), through the history of the discourse of the idea of Europe, they show the possibility and use of “emptiness” in meaning especially when it comes to core values that are set for the foundation of one’s politics.
