Capital & Class 2003 Articles 175 7

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DOI: 10.1177/0309816803079001112003 27: 175Capital & Class

and BeyondRethinking the Normative Content of Critical Theory: Marx, Habermas

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175Book Reviews

Bob Cannon

Rethinking the Normative Content of Critical

Theory: Marx, Habermas and BeyondPalgrave, Basingstoke, 2001, pp. xiv+211.

ISBN 0-333-91809-6 (hbk) 45.00

Reviewed by Gideon Calder

significant features or not, it provides

a framework for discussion.

3. This leads us to the question: Who

is it for? The reading is quite deman-

ding and requires some background

knowledge of Marxist theories, if nota certain acquaintance with regula-

tion theory. This is especially true for

Jessops introductions which, al-

though they are obviously intended

to provide the reader with a general

orientation, tend to be theoretically

dense.

4. Jessops enthusiasm for the subject

and involvement in the discussionleads him, at times, to offer too much

guidance. Judgements as to whether

contributions are simplistic, die-hard

Marxist, overly polemic or one-sided

or, on the contrary, highly innovative

or ground-clearing, could have been

left to the reader. Some of the intro-

ductions are uneven and there are

times when Bob Jessop as contributor

to regulationist theory supplants BobJessop as editor. But these are minor

reservations about a major contribu-

tion to our understanding of regula-

tion theory.

References:

Boyer, R () La Thorie de la rgulation.Une analyse critique, Paris

Boyer, R and Saillard, Y (eds.) ()

La Thorie de la rgulation. Ltat des

savoirs, Paris

It is in the nature of the theory business

that it is hard to find fresh interventions

which are not advertised as ground-

breaking. As strap-lines, Challengingthe foundational categories of x and

Calling into question the boundaries

between aand b have numbingly over-

familiar rings to them. Going by back-

cover blurbs, social theorys ground has

been turned over so much in the past

years or so that by now it must be

mushy pulp. It is a wonder that there is

anything left to overturn.

Sure enough, this book is billed as

incorporating a groundbreaking analy-

sis of the normative content of Marxs

critical strategy. Oddly, this is exactly

what it does. It is a penetrating and

provocative work, which both sheds

light on existing problems in well-trodden areas and raises new, indeed

challenging, points of contention.

Cannons prose is mercifully mastur-

bation-free. He weaves thoughtful takes

on the German philosophical canon

from Kant, fichte and Hegel downinto

an overall narrative of the right and

wrong turnings of modern critical

theory. His agenda is timely, well-

articulated, andbecause of its depth

and nuancedifficult to sum up in a

review.


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Capital & Class #79176

A selective account, then, will have

to suffice. Cannon argues that Marx is

insufficiently historicist in his concep-

tion of labour, and as a result neglects

its normative dimension. He makes

labour itself the transcendental sourceof value, at the neglect of the moral

perspectives of participants in modern

social life. This squeezes out considera-

tion of the way the labour movement

allows for the expansion of ways in which

modern subjects might constitute

themselves in active struggle against the

imperatives of the capitalist system. It

squeezes out, in other words, the nor-mative importance of intersubjectivity.

Moreover, this move is rehearsed,

rather than overcome, in subsequent

developments of critical theory in the

Frankfurt School tradition. By relying

on an objectified sense of social order,

and a transcendental model of ethical

life, both Jrgen Habermas and Axel

Honneth maintain an unfortunate

wedge between the world of social

interaction and struggle and the means

by which we might criticize it. Crucially,

this splitting is at odds with the distinc-

tively modern ethos of self-constitution

that underlies constructive explorations

of the possibility for progressive change.

Cannon sees a nagging ethical deficit in

all this, since it neglects the ways in

which workers play a role in re-moralizing the economic system by

keeping vivid and adaptive their sense

of moral priorities.

Eschewing the external standpoint

of a purportedly objective observer, his

self-proclaimed aim is twofold: to

rethink social struggles in terms of the

expansion of intersubjectivity, and to

extend the scope of intersubjectivity to

embrace Marxs labour-theoretic

account of self-constitution (p. ).

The stakes here might best be explained

by way of an example. Marx is deemed

to seek to circumvent the norms and

values of participants (whether capita-

lists or workers) by laying claim to a

deeper truth. Thus when he, unavoid-

ably, resorts to moral critique of capital-ism, he appeals to the self-objectifying

properties of labour. The irony, for

Cannon, is that by making self-consti-

tution an ontological property of labour

rather than an intersubjective property

of the labour movement, Marx betrays

the very principle of self-constitution by

which he seeks to criticize capitalism.

Cannon insists that labour, rather thanbeing a matter of an instrumental

relation between individuated subjects

and nature, acquires its instrumental

character from the way it is socially

organized and applied under capitalism.

The trick is to combine due attention to

intersubjectivity with (a deficit in Haber-

mas) due attention to labour.

Much of the book is devoted to

teasing out such perceived missed

opportunities in Marxs work and since.

In so doing, Cannons case is subtler and

deeper than there is space here to con-

vey. It culminates in cashings-out of his

meta-analysis in terms of concrete politi-

cal agendas. New Right ideology is treat-

ed as epitomizing the de-normatization

of sociality, and the re-naturalization

of the economy (such that it is removedfrom the sphere of public discourse) of

which Left theorists, despite themselves,

have been guilty in different ways. In

particular, it seeks to replace social net-

works (in which individuals are consti-

tuted as students, passengers, patients,

and so on) with market networks in

which people are constituted as cus-

tomers, relating to their own private

objects rather than to collective projects

and solutions. Meanwhile, of course,

much of the theoretical Left has thrown


4/4

177Book Reviews

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker

The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves,Commoners, and the Hidden History of theRevolutionary AtlanticVerso, London and New York, 2000, pp. 433

ISBN 1-85984-798-6 (hbk) 19:00

Reviewed by John Michael Roberts

up its hands, abandoned grand

narratives and extolled the virtues, for

its own sake, of the local and particular.

In fact, for Cannon, the task of the Left

lies in forging new forms of intersubjec-

tivity, which might fulfil the promise ofmodernity.

Exactly how this promise might be

redeemedor (more seriously) what,

indeed, we should understand by doing

justice to self-constitution are questions

left dangling in a critique whose labour

is primarily negative and interpretative.

Simply historicizing this question at a

stroke, and conceiving self-constitutionin terms of historically relative inter-

subjective configurations, begs the sorts

of questions towards which Marxs early

anthropology was directed: put bluntly,

what do human nature, and relations

between self and world, have to be like

in order for labour to have the values it

does? Cannons is an affirmedly Hegel-

ian case, rejecting a deep disjunction

between subject and object, and objec-

ting to the residual positivism of aspects

of Marxs analysis. That he wants to pay

due attention to labours role in self-

constitution, and that he avoids the

empty luxuries of discourse analysis, are

points very much to his credit. But in

the end, the case against realismin this

sense, the claim that nature, world, and

indeed economic structures might in anyway exist independently of their inter-

subjective constitutiongoes only half-

made. There are ways, explored in

critical realism and elsewhere, of

avoiding positivism and atomism while

retaining the analytic power of a

nuanced approach to the possibility of

structures beyond given epistemic hori-

zonsand avoiding the relativism in thedirection of which much of Cannons

case seems to point.

But within his adopted paradigm, and

in his aim of rethinking the normative

content of critical theory, Cannon

makes an impressive contribution,

bringing key themes and questions into

tighter focus. Mushy pulp they certainly

arent. Still, theyre very much ripe for

the sort of further interrogation that

should follow if the book gets the wide

readership it deserves.

In Penguin published a book called

The London Hanged. Documenting the

changing nature of public executions in

eighteenth century London, a central

theme of the book was to explain why

more and more people were being

hanged during this period for crimes

against private property: many of these

crimes had earlier been deemed cus-

tomary rights. Drawing upon a wealth

of primary documentary evidence the

book rediscovered the lost voices of

Documents

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