Historical criticism without progress: Memory as an emancipatory resource for critical theory

Habermas’s Politics of Rational Freedom: Navigating the History of Philosophy between Faith and Knowledge

“…Despite this historically and culturally limited perspective, Habermas resists both the idea of progress and mechanical philosophies of history (Verovšek 2019). While he recognizes the situatedness of his own perspective, he also acknowledges that "'learning' is path-dependent (pfadabhängigen)," contingent process, which is not governed by any telos (in Schwering 2020).…”

What is democratic backsliding?

“…Both democracy and regression are themes that figure prominently in that tradition, and critical theorists have been exceptionally sensitive to the problems that plague teleological conceptions of history (e.g., Allen, 2016; Habermas, 1992; Horkheimer & Adorno, 1969, pp. 234–237; Jaeggi, 2018; Verovšek, 2019). Nor, moreover, do critical theorists resort to freestanding normative standards that are decoupled from the perspectives of those who participate in a particular individual or collective practice.…”

“…In recent critical theory, the question of how a broadly applicable, non‐Eurocentric understanding of progress might look like has been usefully approached by framing progress in nonteleological , formal , and negativistic terms (Allen, 2016; Jaeggi, 2018; Verovšek, 2019). Progress, it has been suggested, is imaginable without assuming that progressive developments have a particular final goal (a rejection of teleology), nor need a generalized notion of progress stipulate any particular substantive outcomes that dynamics of sociopolitical change need to generate in order to count as “progressive” (a formal, rather than substantive, view).…”

Book review: Critique on the Couch: Why Critical Theory Needs Psychoanalysis

“…Additionally, Klein’s own use of such problematic language raises the issue of severability. As I have argued elsewhere, I do not think that Habermas is committed to the kinds of backward-looking stadial theories of development that Allen is rightfully worried about given his ‘shift away from comprehensive philosophies of history to the paradigm of collective remembrance’ (Verovšek, 2019b: 136). This is not to deny that he did indeed make use of similarly problematic evolutionary language in the past.…”