Framing emancipations

Abstract

This article deals with the topic of emancipation in the social sciences and its transformation in recent decades. Despite its centrality for sociological analysis, emancipation is a topic characterized by ambivalent meanings -autonomy and authenticity, contingency and normativity, free will and negative freedom -and by 'Eurocentric' and 'postcolonial' interpretations. After a long period in which emancipation was considered the unified expression of the critical consciousness of European modernity, its internal ambivalences have provoked criticism (for instance from the cultural turn in social sciences), enhanced dichotomies in theoretical discussion and highlighted the intertwining between emancipation and historical processes such as individualization and capitalism. This article investigates the ambivalences of the concept of emancipation and frames its present plural meanings, testing its current range and heuristic value.

Critical agency and the future of critique

“…The modern critique that developed with the Enlightenment, Hegelian dialectics and Marxism was centred on the idea of discontinuity, of subversion and a break with the interpretations of reality and truth; and it was based on the goal of autonomy and self-emancipation with a horizon of alleged ‘good societies’. Today, the complexity of the knowledge necessary to enhance universalistic forms of critique, and the end of modern utopias with their ambitions for totality, has disclosed the importance ofgrassroots, contingent and situated, critical agencies rooted in tactics of the present and necessary to become accustomed to rapid changes, rather than long-term projects, blurring as well the dualism between what is ‘critical’ or ‘uncritical’, emancipation or control (Rebughini, 2015). With secularized modernity we have learned that there is not an ‘out there’ transcendent from society.…”

Emancipatory struggles and their political organisation: How political parties and social movements respond to changing notions of emancipation

“…In a dialectical turn, however, this re-script of emancipation might hamper or even undermine the political organisation of autonomy and liberation, and thus foreclose emancipatory struggles for large groups within society. In this article, following the work of Rebughini (2015) and Coole (2015), I will shed light on three of emancipation's conceptual ambiguities that have reshaped prevailing imaginations of its political-organisational correspondents (such as social movements and political parties).…”

“…The first conceptual ambiguity regards the difference between understanding emancipation as granted by someone else or as an act of active self-liberation. Ever since the birth of the concept of emancipatio in the Roman Empire (Grass & Koselleck, 1994), and Kant's classical perspective of the exit of the human being from its 'self-incurred immaturity' (Kant, 1970(Kant, [1784, p. 54), the question of whether emancipation, understood as liberation, autonomy and freedom from subjection (Rebughini, 2015) might be only achieved through the emancipatory actor him/herself, or whether it can be top-down organised and granted (Coole, 2015), has fuelled controversies which have reshaped the organisational imaginations of emancipation.…”

“…But not only liberal thought, also the new social movements of the 1970s and 1980s had considered the state and its institutions (such as schools, welfare and health systems) as instruments of control that would not so much contribute to an emancipated society but, quite the contrary, might obstruct struggles for liberation (Blühdorn, 2009;Reichardt, 2014). In connection to this, as Rebughini (2015) emphasises, emancipatory understandings have increasingly shifted from a process focusing on an outside free from heteronomy (autonomy) to a process focusing on an inside true to oneself's goals and destiny (authenticity) (see Blühdorn in this Special Issue). Emancipation, this is the bottom line, has grown more and more self-reflexive and has turned against organisational ideas that had formed in order to grant autonomy and freedom for a large number of people that might not be able to organise it independently.…”

The ‘New’ Migration for Work Phenomenon: The Pursuit of Emancipation and Recognition in the Context of Work

“…Employing this concept and applying it to the field of work therefore offers us the opportunity to extend on existing research and to draw attention to the micro-level of analysis, which illuminates the motivators of skilled migrants in the context of crisis. Honneth’s (1996) concept of emancipation captures the individual’s ability to conduct a social critique of failing institutions and social injustice (Rebughini, 2015), which in turn influences their decision to leave their crisis-stricken homeland. The concept of emancipation is therefore particularly useful in exploring the migration drivers of workers from contexts where labour market conditions, human rights and employment protections are deteriorating.…”