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The divide between information-rich and information-poor

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The divide between information-rich and information-poor

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“Some have argued that we are evolving into a world of the information-rich and information poor, with computer access and skills forming the great divide (Castells 1997; Lyon 1988)" (Dillman, 2001: 1347).
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Dillman, D. (2001) Information Society, Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2, 1344-1348.

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In the last two decades, the large Internet platforms have gained considerable weight in all dimensions of our digital life. According to Lupton (2015: 21), “the internet empires (or ‘megaplatforms’) of the Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon companies have dominated the digital world and changed the ways in which knowledge is produced and reproduced.”
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Lupton, Deborah (2015). Chapter 2: Theorising Digital Society. In Digital Sociology (20-41). London and New York: Routledge.

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In June 2013, Snowden's revelations showed that the National Security Agency (NSA) tapped directly into the servers of nine internet firms, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, to track online communication in a surveillance programme known as "Prism" (BBC, 2014).

Since then, digital surveillance has become a increasingly key topic in the global political agenda.
As Lupton (2015: 34) puts it:
“Digital surveillance technologies differ from previous forms of watching in their pervasiveness, the scope of data they are able to collect and store, their potential longevity and the implications for privacy they evoke.”
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BBC (2014) "Edward Snowden: Leaks that exposed US spy programme". URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-23123964

Lupton, Deborah (2015).Chapter 2: Theorising Digital Society. In Digital Sociology (20-41). London and New York: Routledge.

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Jumio: End-to-End ID and Identity Verification Solutions

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In the real world, proving your identity is pretty straightforward. When you show up in person to open a bank account, rent a car, book a hotel room, gamble at a casino or purchase alcohol, you present your government-issued ID, proof of address or whatever else might be required for the transaction, and the company you're doing business with can physically see that you are who you claim to be.

This process gets far more complex in the digital world. Now, these same companies must find a way to verify you are who you say you are, even though you aren't physically there to present your ID or documentation. Companies must find a way to assure your digital identity matches your real-world identity.

So, what is a digital identity?

A digital identity is all the available online information about an "external agent," aka, an individual person, an organization, or an electronic device. A digital identity is made up of unique identifiers and behavioral patterns that can be tied to that individual, organization, or device.

What Makes Up a Digital Identity?

The information that forms your digital identity can be grouped into two broad categories: your digital attributes and your digital activities. These pieces of information, either alone or combined together, can be used to identify you.

A digital attribute is personally identifiable information (PII) included in online records accessible to private and public sector organizations, and government services. These are most often used when you're opening a bank account, paying taxes, applying for a job or enrolling in school.

Digital activities are online behavioral patterns such as your search history, your social media activity and mobile phone along with other data your devices track such as your location.

Here are some examples of each:

Date of Birth

Medical History

ID Numbers (SSN, driver's license)

Government Issued ID Card or Document (passport, driver's license, etc.)

Bank Details

Login Credentials (username & passwords)

Email Address

Biometrics (fingerprint, eye scan)

Badges and Tokens

Likes, Comments and Shares on Social Sites

Photos on Facebook, Instagram, etc.

Purchase History

Forum Posts

Search Queries

Signed Petitions

Geotagging

Downloading Apps

Cell Phone Usage

Digital Identity: Cybersecurity Risks and Currency for Fraudsters

Your digital identity acts as a sort of currency on the web. In your favor, your digital identity can give you access to your accounts, allow you to open new accounts and give you credibility to engage in a trustworthy way with people, products and services online.Today, you likely use and access your digital identity for almost everything in day-to-day life from social media to dealing with service providers in banking, financial services and healthcare.

On the flip side, the fact that your personal information exists online means that it is subject to hacks, breaches, copycating and theft. And with 4,000 publicly disclosed data breaches and 4.1 billion exposed records in the first six months of 2019 alone, much of that previously personal information is now public information.

Learn What Gartner Says About Fraud Detection and Authentication

Market Guide for Identity Proofing and Affirmation

How Digital Identity Information is Exposed:

Public Wi-Fi networks

Unsecured websites

Third-party data breaches

Phishing attempts

Weak or limited number of passwords

Deepfake videos, voice and graphics

Location sharing settings

Adding strangers to social media accounts

"All the information is available if you know where to look," explained Robert Prigge, Jumio president, in a keynote on the lasting impact of data breaches at the Sibos London 2019 event. "There's a very vibrant marketplace for identity information that can be resold and used against you."

This "vibrant marketplace" is known as the dark web - a network of sites within the deep web, not accessible by search engines or through normal web browsing means. On the dark web, identity data is acquired, sold or dumped.

While people tend to think of Social Security numbers as valuable, they can be purchased on the dark web for as little as a dollar. Banking information can garner $15 to $20, credit card details can range from 25 cents to $60, and at $350 a pop, medical records are among the most valuable.

These marketplaces don't just have individual identity data - they have bundles that combine a passport, a selfie and a utility bill to make the job of a fraudster that much easier.

Just having one or two pieces of someone's digital identity can have a cascading effect that leads to an even more complete digital identity that can be used to access more and more secure, valuable accounts. Your pet's name? Right there on Instagram. Your mother's maiden name? Available on Facebook. Your date of birth and email address? Pretty darn easy to track down.

POV of the Modern Organization

Let's put our business hats on. Operating in an increasingly digital world, many organizations must be able to verify the identities of their customers and users online. Bad actors don't belong in the online ecosystems of financial institutions, the sharing economy, online gaming, mobility services, dating sites and elsewhere. Organizations have a business imperative to care about and verify the digital identities of their users.

This imperative is driven by three key issues:
1. Trust
Your customers and online users trust that you will protect their data. But there's another side to trust. In many industries, your customers or online users are interacting with one another. Whether a buy-sell-trade exchange, ridesharing, house rental, dating site or other similar online platform, trust is the linchpin of it all and the foundation of trust is establishing that the person on the other end of the transaction is who they say they are.

The recent Jumio Global Trust and Safety Survey found that only two-thirds of U.S. adults and one-half of U.K. adults feel "very safe" or "somewhat safe" using online sharing services. Furthermore, the study revealed that a combined 64.4% of U.K. and U.S. consumers feel it's important for online sharing services to verify the identity of new users.
2. Fraud Risk
Hand in hand with the increasing array of identity information housed online is the risk that this information will fall into the hands of fraudsters. Case in point: account takeover fraud is one of the fastest-growing types of fraud. This fraud doesn't just hit your customers in the pocketbook - corporate losses from fraudulent online transactions are expected to reach $25.6 billion by 2020, according to Juniper Research.
3. Compliance
Existing and evolving compliance mandates bring digital identity to the forefront of the minds of compliance managers and executives. KYC and AML compliance mandates are probably the most well known when it comes to their direct impact on online processes and especially, account opening. But there are others, including California's upcoming CCPA compliance rules and Europe's GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) mandates that are driving the need for companies to establish a strong link between digital and real-world identities of their online customers.

Compliance Made Simple

An Essential Guide to Simplify Your Compliance with 7 Key Requirements

What's Wrong with Traditional Approaches to Online Identity Verification?

Most businesses currently use some combination of a classic security paradigm to gain an appropriate level of assurance that the identity of their online customer matches the real-world identity of the customer. This paradigm includes:

Something the customer knows (e.g., security question, password)

Something the customer has (e.g., ID badge, cryptographic key)

Something the customer is (e.g., biometric data)

The problem with this model, however, is that organizations rely disproportionately on the first two categories - what people know or what they have. Unfortunately, things you know, like passwords and security questions, can be easily gleaned from the internet (or dark web) and things you have, such as a cell phone number or SIM card, are increasingly problematic because they can be damaged, lost or stolen.

At Jumio, we contend that businesses still asking only for a passport and utility bill are asking for the wrong information. They're merely asking if a person is who they say they are versus who they really are. But what if that person has a legitimate, yet stolen, ID document? Likewise, looking at an account record is no longer helpful. Companies need to know that the person interfacing with them online is who they purport to be at that very moment.

In fact, in its 2019 Market Guide for Identity Proofing and Corroboration, Gartner now recommends that organizations move away from identity proofing solutions that rely on shared secret verification, such as out-of-wallet knowledge questions or memorable personal data (often used as part of knowledge-based verification solutions).

Asking the Right Questions

Are you really who you say you are?

Are you still really who you say you are?

If you think about it, these are the two questions companies should care most about when it comes to digital identity. The answers to those questions come through two interconnected processes: upfront identity verification and ongoing user authentication. Identity verification confirms the link between the digital and real worlds on the outset of the customer relationship - during account opening or enrollment. Authentication maintains that the person who later logs into the account is the same person who initially opened the account.

For these processes to work, however, you need to establish the connection by verifying who the person really is by verifying something the customer is.

The Future of Digital Identity and Access Management

Increasingly, modern enterprises are turning to biometrics for identity verification and authentication in order to answer the burning questions we posed above. Companies are using biometrics, alongside more traditional ID verification, to strengthen their defenses against online fraud, maintain compliance with AML and KYC, and to build trust in their online ecosystems.

At Jumio, we recommend a best-practice online identity verification process that ties the digital identity to a government-issued ID and after the ID is proven to be authentic, the digital identity is further corroborated with a selfie and certified liveness detection to ensure that the user is physically present. This powerful combination of verifying who someone is, binding that person to face-based biometrics and further securing the transaction with certified liveness detection allows modern organizations to operate more securely in the digital world.

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Digital Identity: What is it & What Makes up a Digital Identity? | Jumio

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In the real world, proving your identity is pretty straightforward. When you show up in person to open a bank account, rent a car, book a hotel room, gamble at a casino or purchase alcohol, you present your government-issued ID, proof of address or whatever else might be required for the transaction, and the company you're doing business with can physically see that you are who you claim to be.

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The printing press created by Johann Gutenberg was one of the most revolutionary inventions of all time, with far-reaching effects that have shaped life as we know it today. While the impacts of the press were felt on all spheres of life-scientific, religious, and economic-perhaps some of the most significant and rippling effects were felt in the social sphere.

Johann Gutenberg's printing press revolutionized the world as it existed, creating huge ripples in social, cultural, religious, and intellectual paradigms. (Image: elen_studio/Shutterstock)

To really understand the pervasive impact that the printing press had on society, it becomes imperative to have an idea about what society was like before the invention.

Life Before the Printing Press

Long, long before the printing press was ever even conceptualized, a man was not equipped with the instrument of writing. It was only the spoken word that was passed on. Memory was the tool that was relied on. As a result of this, when writing began to enter the mainstream world, it was condemned by a lot of people, including Socrates, who felt that it would just create forgetfulness and create a 'show of wisdom without reality'.

This opinion, of course, was extremely ephemeral, though, and soon thereafter, writing had become very common. Still, it remained at the jurisdiction of the elites of society, preserving the written word on papyrus or vellum. In monasteries, cathedrals, and universities of the medieval world, the writing was not done in ordinary language; a special, holy language, Latin, was used for the purpose. This further restricted access to writing to only those who were learned in Latin.

Over the years, the libraries of monasteries became repositories of rare, exquisite, and sometimes, unique texts. Whenever copies were required, they would be made in a special scriptorium, the room of the scribes, where a scribe, usually a monk, would try his best to replicate the text as closely as possible, without making errors. Despite his best efforts, there were often inadvertent errors in the texts. Despite this, copying was seen as holy labor, and many men devoted their lives to it, creating, over the years, some beautiful products, such as the Book of Kells.

But even though the work tried to avoid variability, there were changes that gradually came about. A crucial one that had taken place by the start of the middle ages was the shift from scrolls to codices, the form in which we are acquainted with our books. By reducing the wear and tear that was inevitable from the constant rolling and unrolling of scrolls, the codex made the written word more accessible, and for that, many historians believe it to be an even bigger revolution than the printing press.

Bookselling also became a much bigger vocation in the later middle ages, with stationery shops sprouting up around the young universities of Medieval Europe, around 1350. Here, scribes would copy books on demand.

With the entry of the Gutenberg printing press, all of this, and several other social systems, went through a major overhaul.

Effects of the Gutenberg Printing Press

Gutenberg's press had strong associations with the Christian authority. He saw the catholic world as a serious market for his products and began to print Bibles. These newer, 'approved', and more uniform bibles became a show for Papal authority, and warded off rival popes, maintaining, and in fact, strengthening authority over Christendom.

Later on, Gutenberg's printing press was used to print copies of the Catholic priest, Martin Luther's works, including his Ninety-Five Theses, calling for changes within the church, which were read in huge numbers, technically making Martin Luther the first-ever best selling author. In this manner, the printing press was of paramount importance in spreading the protestant reforms.

While the importance of this influence can not be undermined, Gutenberg's press had some other effects that were felt and understood far more dramatically at the time.

Learn more about Gutenberg's Print Revolution.

Democratizing Access to the Written Word

Printing had revolutionized the speed and range of distribution of texts. It permitted books to be printed at extremely high speeds in comparison to hand copying, potentially ushering in the age of bestsellers. As the technology proliferated further throughout Europe, costs came down with mass production, cutting costs to as much as one - eighth of the former costs. In this manner, it managed to democratize access to texts, which had earlier been under the purview of religious institutions.

Eventually, public libraries began to spring up, with the first one coming up in Florence, bookselling exploded, and book fairs began to become increasingly common. Eventually, all of this resulted in the creation of a mass audience for the printed word in the form of books, newspapers, and journals.

As a direct consequence of democratized access to text, the printing press aided in the creation of new communities that were based around common readings, and the discussion of their ideas. The creation of this discourse gave birth to a new individual, the intellectual, who communicated on the basis of shared ideas, reading and writing, and did not necessarily belong to the clergy or religious orders.

This created a virtual network, often of international members, referred to by different names, such as the Learned commonwealth. Since printing shops became gatherings for such people, printers began to become public intellectuals. Ben Franklin, for instance, was a printer and an intellectual.

Reimagining Hand-written Text

While the print revolution was, doubtlessly, a turning point in history, publishers of new texts were working to reassure contemporaries that the process was not completely new, or radical, often by referring to their work as 'artificial writing', which sounded more familiar in comparison to newer, technical terms.

Printers tried to make their work look like manuscripts, and followed the scribal design, such as by using two-columned pages.

At the same time, scribal work had not vanished overnight. In fact, the prestige of handwritten texts endured, as more exclusive and rare books began to rise in value to the tasteful customer.

In fact, some scribes had to copy printed books in order to meet demand, strange as that sounds. In this manner, the position of handwritten books in the market had, although not completely changed, been repackaged as an exquisite luxury.

This is a transcript from the video series Turning Points in Modern History. Watch it now, on Wondrium.

Further Outcomes of the Printing Press

As can easily imagine, and well understood now, the effects of the printing press did not stop at that. As stated already, printing played a key role in the proliferation of the protestant movement.

Printing shaped the linguistic world as well, by creating a shift from Latin to vernacular languages in a bid to cater to the masses. These, when standardized, became the languages we know and use today.

Printing was also of supreme importance in the later Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the growth of national communities. While the Renaissance came much before the print revolution, it was the printing press that brought it back to life.

Similarly, even though the intellectual movement far predated the printing press, the press helped humanists revive classical knowledge by supplying classic texts, ironically becoming the new technology that helped to revive antiquity.

Printing sped the Scientific movement, allowing the publishing of Copernicus's work on the geocentric model, often seen as the launching work of the movement.

All these were extremely well-known movements, whose effects are with us still, and are likely to stay for the foreseeable time, and with them, so are the effects of the print revolution and Gutenberg's printing press.

Learn more about The French Revolution.

Commonly Asked Questions about the Social Impact of the Printing Press

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To really understand the pervasive impact that the printing press had on society, it becomes imperative to have an idea about what society was like before the invention. Long, long before the printing press was ever even conceptualized, a man was not equipped with the instrument of writing.

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Printing Press and Societal Transformation

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Printing Press and Societal Transformation

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Knowledge is power, as the saying goes, and the invention of the mechanical movable type printing press helped disseminate knowledge wider and faster than ever before.

German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg is credited with inventing the printing press around 1436, although he was far from the first to automate the book-printing process. Woodblock printing in China dates back to the 9th century and Korean bookmakers were printing with moveable metal type a century before Gutenberg.

But most historians believe Gutenberg's adaptation, which employed a screw-type wine press to squeeze down evenly on the inked metal type, was the key to unlocking the modern age. With the newfound ability to inexpensively mass-produce books on every imaginable topic, revolutionary ideas and priceless ancient knowledge were placed in the hands of every literate European, whose numbers doubled every century.

Here are just some of the ways the printing press helped pull Europe out of the Middle Ages and accelerate human progress.

1. A Global News Network Was Launched

Gutenberg didn't live to see the immense impact of his invention. His greatest accomplishment was the first print run of the Bible in Latin, which took three years to print around 200 copies, a miraculously speedy achievement in the day of hand-copied manuscripts.

But as historian Ada Palmer explains, Gutenberg's invention wasn't profitable until there was a distribution network for books. Palmer, a professor of early modern European history at the University of Chicago, compares early printed books like the Gutenberg Bible to how e-books struggled to find a market before Amazon introduced the Kindle.

"Congratulations, you've printed 200 copies of the Bible; there are about three people in your town who can read the Bible in Latin," says Palmer. "What are you going to do with the other 197 copies?"

Gutenberg died penniless, his presses impounded by his creditors. Other German printers fled for greener pastures, eventually arriving in Venice, which was the central shipping hub of the Mediterranean in the late 15th century.

"If you printed 200 copies of a book in Venice, you could sell five to the captain of each ship leaving port," says Palmer, which created the first mass-distribution mechanism for printed books.

The ships left Venice carrying religious texts and literature, but also breaking news from across the known world. Printers in Venice sold four-page news pamphlets to sailors, and when their ships arrived in distant ports, local printers would copy the pamphlets and hand them off to riders who would race them off to dozens of towns.

Since literacy rates were still very low in the 1490s, locals would gather at the pub to hear a paid reader recite the latest news, which was everything from bawdy scandals to war reports.

"This radically changed the consumption of news," says Palmer. "It made it normal to go check the news every day."

2. The Renaissance Kicked Into High Gear

The Italian Renaissance began nearly a century before Gutenberg invented his printing press when 14th-century political leaders in Italian city-states like Rome and Florence set out to revive the Ancient Roman educational system that had produced giants like Caesar, Cicero and Seneca.

One of the chief projects of the early Renaissance was to find long-lost works by figures like Plato and Aristotle and republish them. Wealthy patrons funded expensive expeditions across the Alps in search of isolated monasteries. Italian emissaries spent years in the Ottoman Empire learning enough Ancient Greek and Arabic to translate and copy rare texts into Latin.

The operation to retrieve classic texts was in action long before the printing press, but publishing the texts had been arduously slow and prohibitively expensive for anyone other than the richest of the rich. Palmer says that one hand-copied book in the 14th century cost as much as a house and libraries cost a small fortune. The largest European library in 1300 was the university library of Paris, which had 300 total manuscripts.

By the 1490s, when Venice was the book-printing capital of Europe, a printed copy of a great work by Cicero only cost a month's salary for a school teacher. The printing press didn't launch the Renaissance, but it vastly accelerated the rediscovery and sharing of knowledge.

"Suddenly, what had been a project to educate only the few wealthiest elite in this society could now become a project to put a library in every medium-sized town, and a library in the house of every reasonably wealthy merchant family," says Palmer.

3. Martin Luther Becomes the First Best-Selling Author

There's a famous quote attributed to German religious reformer Martin Luther that sums up the role of the printing press in the Protestant Reformation: "Printing is the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one."

Luther wasn't the first theologian to question the Church, but he was the first to widely publish his message. Other "heretics" saw their movements quickly quashed by Church authorities and the few copies of their writings easily destroyed. But the timing of Luther's crusade against the selling of indulgences coincided with an explosion of printing presses across Europe.

As the legend goes, Luther nailed his "95 Theses" to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. Palmer says that broadsheet copies of Luther's document were being printed in London as quickly as 17 days later.

Thanks to the printing press and the timely power of his message, Luther became the world's first best-selling author. Luther's translation of the New Testament into German sold 5,000 copies in just two weeks. From 1518 to 1525, Luther's writings accounted for a third of all books sold in Germany and his German Bible went through more than 430 editions.

4. Printing Powers the Scientific Revolution

The English philosopher Francis Bacon, who's credited with developing the scientific method, wrote in 1620 that the three inventions that forever changed the world were gunpowder, the nautical compass and the printing press.

For millennia, science was a largely solitary pursuit. Great mathematicians and natural philosophers were separated by geography, language and the sloth-like pace of hand-written publishing. Not only were handwritten copies of scientific data expensive and hard to come by, they were also prone to human error.

With the newfound ability to publish and share scientific findings and experimental data with a wide audience, science took great leaps forward in the 16th and 17th centuries. When developing his sun-centric model of the galaxy in the early 1500s, for example, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus relied not only on his own heavenly observations, but on printed astronomical tables of planetary movements.

When historian Elizabeth Eisenstein wrote her 1980 book about the impact of the printing press, she said that its biggest gift to science wasn't necessarily the speed at which ideas could spread with printed books, but the accuracy with which the original data were copied. With printed formulas and mathematical tables in hand, scientists could trust the fidelity of existing data and devote more energy to breaking new ground.

5. Fringe Voices Get a Platform

"Whenever a new information technology comes along, and this includes the printing press, among the very first groups to be 'loud' in it are the people who were silenced in the earlier system, which means radical voices," says Palmer.

It takes effort to adopt a new information technology, whether it's the ham radio, an internet bulletin board, or Instagram. The people most willing to take risks and make the effort to be early adopters are those who had no voice before that technology existed.

"In the print revolution, that meant radical heresies, radical Christian splinter groups, radical egalitarian groups, critics of the government," says Palmer. "The Protestant Reformation is only one of many symptoms of print enabling these voices to be heard."

As critical and alternative opinions entered the public discourse, those in power tried to censor it. Before the printing press, censorship was easy. All it required was killing the "heretic" and burning his or her handful of notebooks.

But after the printing press, Palmer says it became nearly impossible to destroy all copies of a dangerous idea. And the more dangerous a book was claimed to be, the more the people wanted to read it. Every time the Church published a list of banned books, the booksellers knew exactly what they should print next.

6. From Public Opinion to Popular Revolution

During the Enlightenment era, philosophers like John Locke, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were widely read among an increasingly literate populace. Their elevation of critical reasoning above custom and tradition encouraged people to question religious authority and prize personal liberty.

Increasing democratization of knowledge in the Enlightenment era led to the development of public opinion and its power to topple the ruling elite. Writing in pre-Revolution France, Louis-Sebástien Mercier declared:

"A great and momentous revolution in our ideas has taken place within the last thirty years. Public opinion has now become a preponderant power in Europe, one that cannot be resisted... one may hope that enlightened ideas will bring about the greatest good on Earth and that tyrants of all kinds will tremble before the universal cry that echoes everywhere, awakening Europe from its slumbers."

"[Printing] is the most beautiful gift from heaven," continues Mercier. "It soon will change the countenance of the universe... Printing was only born a short while ago, and already everything is heading toward perfection... Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the world! Tremble before the virtuous writer!"

Even the illiterate couldn't resist the attraction of revolutionary Enlightenment authors, Palmer says. When Thomas Paine published "Common Sense" in 1776, the literacy rate in the American colonies was around 15 percent, yet there were more copies printed and sold of the revolutionary tract than the entire population of the colonies.

7. Machines 'Steal Jobs' From Workers

The Industrial Revolution didn't get into full swing in Europe until the mid-18th century, but you can make the argument that the printing press introduced the world to the idea of machines "stealing jobs" from workers.

Before Gutenberg's paradigm-shifting invention, scribes were in high demand. Bookmakers would employ dozens of trained artisans to painstakingly hand-copy and illuminate manuscripts. But by the late 15th century, the printing press had rendered their unique skillset all but obsolete.

On the flip side, the huge demand for printed material spawned the creation of an entirely new industry of printers, brick-and-mortar booksellers and enterprising street peddlers. Among those who got his start as a printer's apprentice was future Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin.

Fact Check

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7 Ways the Printing Press Changed the World | HISTORY

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In the 15th century, an innovation enabled the mass production of books. The ability to share knowledge more widely changed the world forever.

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Men working at a printing press, proofing copy, inking, and setting type. Wood engraving. 1800-1899, after Stradanus, ca1580. Antwerp (Netherlands)

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Diachronic comparisons - some thoughts/questions

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Diachronic comparisons - some thoughts/questions

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I don't think the phenomenon of social/cultural/economic transformation is uniquely tied to the advancement of digital technologies. Any tech advancement, esp. those pertaining to the production and dissemination of information, e.g. invention of writing, invention of printing, introduction of paper, etc., has revolutionized and transformed the society from which it resulted.

How does digital transformation compare to earlier instances of social/cultural/technological transformation? Is societal change bigger this time around or at the same level as previous technological revolutions? How does one evaluate that? Is it a matter of scale, of speed (of the transformation processes), or other criteria entirely?
Food for thought...

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The "Digital Revolution", COVID19 & Social Inequality

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The "Digital Revolution", COVID19 & Social Inequality

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Quotes from the article:

"There is no aspect of social, economic, or political development that has escaped the rapid and far-reaching transformation of the Digital Revolution. The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated this trend and has revealed the digitalisation has, in many cases, deepened, rather than mitigated, gender and socio-economic inequalities."

"The digital technology revolution or fourth industrial revolution, as it is being called, has united our world while at the same time creating new divisions: new borders, a deepening of the North-South and rural-urban divides, and an expanded gap between the haves and the have-nots. It has opened new spaces for increased participation and exchange of ideas on the one hand, but one that can fuel violence and abuse, hate speech and political polarisation, on the other."

"Digital Technology has deepened inequalities between and within countries; the unfortunate disadvantages for those not connected are self-perpetuating and will only accrue with time. No access to internet means no access to information and education, which will result in poorer health, no access to jobs, less participation in social, cultural, and political activities, and ultimately in social marginalisation and isolation."

"It is the role of civil society to advocate for the right role of digital technology in a Socially Just Transition to Sustainable Development and in the promotion of gender equality. Policy makers will have to address access, affordability and use through regulation and in partnerships with other stakeholders. Free global broadband access to all is a must: remote access needs to be conceptualised as a basic right and no longer just as a privilege. Whether it is for distant learning, virtual medicine, or remote work, the internet has become a daily necessity and will remain so as the pandemic reshapes the future organisation of societies."

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Digital technology and Social Change

SI UN Representative, Maria Fornella-Oehninger, brings us the next in a series of blogs relating to the Beijing Platform for Action as she discusses the emerging theme of 'gender equality and the implications of the digital revolution'.

"There is no aspect of social, economic, or political development that has escaped the rapid and far-reaching transformation of the Digital Revolution. The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated this trend and has revealed the digitalisation has, in many cases, deepened, rather than mitigated, gender and socio-economic inequalities. Therefore, we welcome the opportunity to advocate for digital inclusion both in this year's Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) review of the Beijing Platform for Action which has recognised gender equality implications of the digital revolution as a critical emerging issue for the empowerment of women and girls, and in the UN Commission for Social Development (CSocD), which has set "a socially just transition to sustainable development: the role of digital technology and the well-being of all" as the priority theme for its 59th annual session in February 2021. The following notes reflect key ideas, research, and policy recommendations on the topic.

The digital technology revolution or fourth industrial revolution, as it is being called, has united our world while at the same time creating new divisions: new borders, a deepening of the North-South and rural-urban divides, and an expanded gap between the haves and the have-nots. It has opened new spaces for increased participation and exchange of ideas on the one hand, but one that can fuel violence and abuse, hate speech and political polarisation, on the other.

Like other industrial revolutions before it, it is dominated by commercial interests in the form of monopolies: the firms that generate new means of information and communication technologies are very few and are concentrated in two countries: China and the United States. Big Tech companies not only dominate the sector, stifling competition and innovation, but also have access to millions of internet users' personal data, the most valuable commodity in the new digital era.

Digital Technology has deepened inequalities between and within countries; the unfortunate disadvantages for those not connected are self-perpetuating and will only accrue with time. No access to internet means no access to information and education, which will result in poorer health, no access to jobs, less participation in social, cultural, and political activities, and ultimately in social marginalisation and isolation.

Todays' transformations are different from earlier technological revolution in the vertiginous speed at which breakthroughs occur, in their extensive scope as both time and space are abolished, and in the enormous opportunities they offer for positive social development.

Indeed, tech-enabled change could become the number one accelerator of the Sustainable Development Goals if priorities are set correctly. Information and Communication technologies (ICTS) underlie all SDGs from reducing carbon emission to building sustainable cities, from achieving gender equality to promoting good health and well-being for all. If widely shared, ICTs can act as immediate accelerators of SDGs and Agenda 2030.

It is the role of civil society to advocate for the right role of digital technology in a Socially Just Transition to Sustainable Development and in the promotion of gender equality. Policy makers will have to address access, affordability and use through regulation and in partnerships with other stakeholders. Free global broadband access to all is a must: remote access needs to be conceptualised as a basic right and no longer just as a privilege. Whether it is for distant learning, virtual medicine, or remote work, the internet has become a daily necessity and will remain so as the pandemic reshapes the future organisation of societies.

It is imperative that these policies be gender-sensitive, since women and girls face additional hurdles on all fronts, whether it is in the inherent gender biases and socio-cultural norms still prevalent in most societies, or in their lack of education and technical skills that enable productive usage and adoption of new technologies.

While access to mobile technology is in general no longer a barrier (women are 26% more likely to have smartphones than men), it is in productive usage and adoption of these technologies where the main gap reopens: women tend to use the internet less frequently than men and for different purposes, more for social communication, on-line shopping and family activities than for online banking, job-seeking or for increasing their skills. In sum:

Skills in high demand in digital intensive sectors are displayed more by men than women, and this will increasingly affect the labor market of the future.

Women need to acquire more self-organisation, management, and communication skills as well as advanced numerical skills.

Girls still lag in enrolment in STEM studies; policy makers need to target gender biases in curricula, helping shape parental preferences as well as teachers' expectations and biases, and promoting encouragement throughout the educational system.

Obstacles to adult education and lifelong learning for aging women need to be removed and more opportunities need to be created and coordinated across institutions and actors (employers, education and community institutions and social policy makers)

We must advocate for knowledge that is equally shared, and whose content is empowering to women and girls, and to all vulnerable groups.

As we foresee the dire consequences of Covid-19, starting with a precipitous drop of GDPs worldwide, the loss of human capital and the many jobs that will not come back, we must recognise that capital will rush in to produce short-term recovery; it will not be directed toward solving structural, persistent, long-term social problems like the rise of the working poor, the gender divide and the loss of educational opportunities.

Governments need to effect a change of direction towards a sustainable new balance that is less concerned with efficiency and more focused on building resilient communities, on the localisation of supply chains, on local markets and local food chains; on building smart cities, promoting cultural and political change in favour of gender equality, and overall protecting and respecting human rights and values.

To harness the energy and potential of digital technology for all, the reform of structures and institutions must revolve around people, for example, by creating an Ombudsman's office so that people can appeal to an expert to bring their needs to policy makers. A shift to this kind of technology-based sustainability needs to be perceived as fair to gain public support. Digital technology is no longer a luxury, it is an every-day need that has become a public good. Change must come through a bottom-up, civil society approach, building "with" and not "for" the people. An internationally agreed upon framework on human rights and ethics will be fundamental to guide a governance process that includes accountability and transparency of the producers of technology in the private sector.

In the context of limited resources, a redirection of production, most notably in the post-Covid era, will require a shared burden, with a plan for redistribution through taxes, the right subsidies, and the elimination of tax havens. It will also demand cultural change: reduced consumerism, increased social cohesion and a new awareness of the public good, a higher public spirit of cooperation if, for nothing else, for mere survival.

The transformative power of digitalisation needs to be harnessed in the direction of greater equality. A more equal, more transparent, and more secure society will have to be the foundation of this transformation, and an absolute need for the paradigmatic shift we are facing.

Technology will guide change over the next generation; this will demand international cooperation and a rules-based globalised effort that takes into strict consideration human values. Challenges of implementation will always be present, but universal regulations, the power to monitor implementation and call out violators will be in the hands of international organisations and organised segments of societies.

This Fourth Industrial Revolution has produced a paradigm shift between physical and digital realities. This schism has been made more apparent (and the need to close it more urgent) by the pandemic. Time and space, the basic dimensions between which we humans organise our societies and our lives, have been all but abolished, thus transforming forever the way we live. Societies and governments must face the facts without delay. We must react now to make sure the advantages of digital technology for social development are widely shared by all, especially the most vulnerable, and its negative aspects are prevented from slowing down advancement toward completion of the SDGs and Agenda 2030."
Recommended Reading:
THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION: Implications for Gender Equality and Women's Rights 25 Years after Beijing, UN Women, 2020.

SI's Beijing Platform for Action Review Blogs:

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Digital technology and Social Change - Soroptimist International

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Digital technology and Social Change SI UN Representative, Maria Fornella-Oehninger, brings us the next in a series of blogs relating to the Beijing Platform for Action as she discusses the emerging theme of 'gender equality and the implications of the digital revolution'.

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A very simple yet increasingly prominent and powerful digital tool (if I can call it that) that has transformed several aspects of our (urban) lives is the QR code. The use of QR codes has briefly been mentioned by prof. Vaide in the Week 2 lecture, but I think it is worth fleshing this out a bit more.
Originating in the automotive industry, where in the 1990s they were used to track vehicles during the manufacturing phase, Quick Response codes have gradually infiltrated all aspects of urban life.
My initial experiences with them was as an Educational Technology instructor back in 2015, where I used to teach how they can be used in teaching for creating exercises and games. I also used them to store information on promotional material, such as posters, etc, as well as a way to share my digital business card with people. I was fascinated by the ways in which they linked the physical world to the digital one; which in light of this module's readings, makes me think more concretely of Lupton's "sociomaterial perspective" (2015), as QR codes transform intangible information into a tangible object (an image on a piece of paper).
In recent years, QR codes are used everywhere and by everyone: as a way of payment (in Belgium, you can just scan the code and pay with your bank account), in restaurants to allow customers to access the menu digitally (instead of printing out entire catalogues), in museum exhibitions adding interactivity to the exhibits, in travelling for tickets, boarding passes, etc., and, of course, this year they have also been used for the COVID19 safepasses storing critical personal/medical information (name, date of birth, vaccination details). The latter appears to bring to the fore some of the controversial aspects of the use of QR codes, namely, issues of data privacy, of online tracking and monitoring activities by unseen powers, and even of issues of freedom (or perceived lack thereof) (see also attached link of Erin Woo's article of last July (2021) in The Guardian, "QR Codes Are Here to Stay. So Is the Tracking They Allow"). The other day I witnessed an antivaxxer march in Brussels, where people were holding tableaus with statements against QR codes, viewing them as tools of the government(s) to compromise their freedoms. This made me wonder whether these same people are as critical of QR codes when they have to use them in travelling, in visiting leisure parks, or in ordering food.

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Fueled by a desire for touchless transactions, QR codes popped up everywhere in the pandemic. Businesses don't want to give them up.

Teeth, a bar in San Francisco, began using digital menus based on QR code technology in August. Credit... Ulysses Ortega for The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO - When people enter Teeth, a bar in San Francisco's Mission neighborhood, the bouncer gives them options. They can order food and drinks at the bar, he says, or they can order via a QR code.

Each table at Teeth has a card emblazoned with the code, a pixelated black-and-white square. Customers simply scan it with their phone camera to open a website for the online menu. Then they can input their credit card information to pay, all without touching a paper menu or interacting with a server.

A scene like this was a rarity 18 months ago, but not anymore. "In 13 years of bar ownership in San Francisco, I've never seen a sea change like this that brought the majority of customers into a new behavior so quickly," said Ben Bleiman, Teeth's owner.

QR codes - essentially a kind of bar code that allows transactions to be touchless - have emerged as a permanent tech fixture from the coronavirus pandemic. Restaurants have adopted them en masse, retailers including CVS and Foot Locker have added them to checkout registers, and marketers have splashed them all over retail packaging, direct mail, billboards and TV advertisements.

But the spread of the codes has also let businesses integrate more tools for tracking, targeting and analytics, raising red flags for privacy experts. That's because QR codes can store digital information such as when, where and how often a scan occurs. They can also open an app or a website that then tracks people's personal information or requires them to input it.

As a result, QR codes have allowed some restaurants to build a database of their customers' order histories and contact information. At retail chains, people may soon be confronted by personalized offers and incentives marketed within QR code payment systems.

"People don't understand that when you use a QR code, it inserts the entire apparatus of online tracking between you and your meal," said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. "Suddenly your offline activity of sitting down for a meal has become part of the online advertising empire."

"I've never seen a sea change like this that brought the majority of customers into a new behavior so quickly," Ben Bleiman, Teeth's owner, said of QR codes. Credit... Ulysses Ortega for The New York Times

QR codes may be new to many American shoppers, but they have been popular internationally for years. Invented in 1994 to streamline car manufacturing at a Japanese company, QR codes became widely used in China in recent years after being integrated into the AliPay and WeChat Pay digital payment apps.

In the United States, the technology was hampered by clumsy marketing, a lack of consumer understanding and the hassle of needing a special app to scan the codes, said Scott Stratten, who wrote the 2013 business book "QR Codes Kill Kittens" with his wife, Alison Stratten.

That has changed for two reasons, Mr. Stratten said. In 2017, he said, Apple made it possible for the cameras in iPhones to recognize QR codes, spreading the technology more widely. Then came the "pandemic, and it's amazing what a pandemic can make us do," he said.

Half of all full-service restaurant operators in the United States have added QR code menus since the start of the pandemic, according to the National Restaurant Association. In May 2020, PayPal introduced QR code payments and has since added them at CVS, Nike, Foot Locker and around one million small businesses. Square, another digital payments firm, rolled out a QR code ordering system for restaurants and retailers in September.

Businesses don't want to give up the benefits that QR codes have brought to their bottom line, said Sharat Potharaju, the chief executive of the digital marketing company MobStac. Deals and special offers can be bundled with QR code systems and are easy to get in front of people when they look at their phones, he said. Businesses also can gather data on consumer spending patterns through QR codes.

"With traditional media, like a billboard or TV, you can estimate how many people may have seen it, but you don't know how people actually interacted with it," said Sarah Cucchiara, a senior vice president at BrandMuscle, a marketing firm that introduced a QR code menu product last year. "With QR codes, we can get reporting on those scans."

Tom Sharon, right, and Jamie Sunderland, founders of Cheqout. Mr. Sharon said restaurants that used QR code menus could save 30 percent to 50 percent on labor costs. Credit... Ulysses Ortega for The New York Times

Cheqout and Mr. Yum, two start-ups that sell technology for creating QR code menus at restaurants, also said the codes had brought advantages to businesses.

Restaurants that use QR code menus can save 30 percent to 50 percent on labor costs by reducing or eliminating the need for servers to take orders and collect payments, said Tom Sharon, a co-founder of Cheqout.

Digital menus also make it easier to persuade people to spend more with offers to add fries or substitute more expensive spirits in a cocktail, with photographs of menu items to make them more appealing, said Kim Teo, a Mr. Yum co-founder. Orders placed through the QR code menu also let Mr. Yum inform restaurants what items are selling, so they can add a menu section with the most popular items or highlight dishes they want to sell.

These increased digital abilities are what worry privacy experts. Mr. Yum, for instance, uses cookies in the digital menu to track a customer's purchase history and gives restaurants access to that information, tied to the customer's phone number and credit cards. It is piloting software in Australia so restaurants can offer people a "recommended to you" section based on their previous orders, Ms. Teo said.

QR codes "are an important first step toward making your experience in physical space outside of your home feel just like being tracked by Google on your screen," said Lucy Bernholz, the director of Stanford University's Digital Civil Society Lab.

Ms. Teo said that each restaurant's customer data was available only to that establishment and that Mr. Yum did not use the information to reach out to customers. It also does not sell the data to any third-party brokers, she said.

Cheqout collects only customers' names, phone numbers and protected payment information, which it does not sell to third parties, Mr. Sharon said.

At Teeth, customers can order food and drinks at the counter or via QR code menus. Credit... Ulysses Ortega for The New York Times

On a recent blustery evening at Teeth, customers shared mixed reviews of the QR code ordering system from Cheqout, which the bar had installed in August. Some said it was convenient, but added that they would prefer a traditional menu at a fine dining establishment.

"If you're on a date and you're whipping your phone out, it's a distraction," Daniela Sernich, 29, said.

Jonathan Brooner-Contreras, 26, said that QR code ordering was convenient but that he feared the technology would put him out of his job as a bartender at a different bar in the neighborhood.

"It's like if a factory replaced all of its workers with robots," he said. "People depend on those 40 hours."

Regardless of customers' feelings, Mr. Bleiman said Cheqout's data showed that about half of Teeth's orders - and as much as 65 percent during televised sports games - were coming through the QR code system.

"They may not like it," he said in a text message. "But they're doing it!"

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QR Codes Are Here to Stay. So Is the Tracking They Allow. (Published 2021)

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Fueled by a desire for touchless transactions, QR codes popped up everywhere in the pandemic. Businesses don't want to give them up. SAN FRANCISCO - When people enter Teeth, a bar in San Francisco's Mission neighborhood, the bouncer gives them options.

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CT as scientific approach - some reflections

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CT as scientific approach - some reflections

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From the module's video lectures and my own research experiences, I understand Critical Theory as a lens - a methodological, theoretical, and/or conceptual lens - through which one views, approaches, and studies a field of inquiry; in our case, CT can be a lens to study DH as a field, DH projects, DH methods, and DH practices. For example, one might use queer theory as a lens through which to view trends in DH, or to design a DH project informed by queer theory as a layer of interpretation or in the selection of material, or to question issues of representation in DH practices, e.g. in the curation of digital art exhibitions and so on. But, of course, one has to bear in mind the limitations in such approaches; particularly, to be wary of proclaiming objectivity (which I don't think exists in research - each researcher has their own subjective perspective and unique point of view) and be mindful of our own biases.

(Interestingly, there is a critical piece on the use of the "lens" metaphor in critical theory, in relation to literature: Believing Is Seeing: The “Lens” Metaphor in Critical Theory | Literary Imagination | Oxford Academic (oup.com). Despite its rather critical conclusion, the article does point out that: "a lens suggests a permanent way of seeing, a way of seeing perhaps not otherwise available. The lens metaphor likely succeeds because it relies on the figure of vision for understanding. As such, it also suggests a perspective on the object viewed.")

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Hardly a day goes by that I don't hear someone speak of literary theories as so many lenses one pulls from the metaphorical camera bag. Or maybe they are from the optometrist's shop as professionals select from a variety of lenses to correct our vision. In any case, figuring literary theories as lenses appears to be the metaphor that embodies a widespread understanding of the role of theory today.

Before this was the critical toolbox. For several decades leading up to the appearance of the first edition of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism in 2001, critics referred to the concepts and ideas in literary theory as tools. The assortment of those tools taken together represented a toolbox the reader might carry from one text to another. The toolbox perhaps signaled a level of training and know-how that distinguished a "professional" reader trained in various methods of investigation from the lay reader who lacked such formal training.

That metaphor drops out of use around the turn of the century. The MLA Index clearly demonstrates the shift in the metaphor when in the 2000s the toolbox metaphor trends down to nearly nothing, while the lens metaphor begins and in the later 2010s rises to a peak. The publication of the canonical Norton Anthology may or may not have something to do with the changing of the metaphorical guard, but a debate arose at the time of the book's release in which the editor Vincent Leitch argued that theory is not a toolbox, but, as a concern and understanding of the world, theory is an end in itself. If it is indeed an end in itself, where does that leave the literature?

This is not the place to rehearse that debate, but Leitch's argument seems to have won the day. Or perhaps he was out front of a major shift in our thinking about the role of theory and its relationship to the arts. New paradigms require new metaphors. Does the paradigm behind the lens metaphor assume that the literature is just another commentary on, or exemplification of, the theory? Does that paradigm relegate the primary source to a secondary status? It is significant to note that the adjective Literary in the titles of competing anthologies is absent from the Norton volume.

Leitch's primary objection to the toolbox metaphor seems to be the idea that criticism serves as an ancillary activity to the once more central work of literary analysis. That is what the toolbox metaphor essentially suggested: meaning resides in the literary text, and some application of tools might be effectively used to recover that meaning. One does not need a phenomenological theory of the tool as equipment (Heidegger: das Zeug) to get there. The toolbox metaphor may be more ad hoc and informal than Heidegger's notion of a tool as "ready-to-hand," though the two might overlap. The idea of an array of tools suggests that they might even be interchangeable as long as they accomplish the job. A screwdriver can be used as a gouge or pry bar, a pipe wrench used as a lever or hammer. There are only seven simple machines, after all. The toolbox metaphor may be completely too mechanical in its implications to apply to the nature of meaning, but the idea that one tool may be as useful as any other to extract meaning does shift the attention from the tool to the meaning.

At first, the critical lens metaphor seems functionally equivalent to the critical toolbox metaphor. Both, for instance, can be used in isolation or combination with others of its kind. But whereas the tool serves a temporary usefulness, a lens suggests a permanent way of seeing, a way of seeing perhaps not otherwise available. The lens metaphor likely succeeds because it relies on the figure of vision for understanding. As such, it also suggests a perspective on the object viewed. But after this, the metaphor runs into problems. In fact, both metaphors do. One might naturally ask, can we uncover meaning without a tool, and how many lenses are required to see a literary work? As we further consider both metaphors, we might wonder the degree to which either is really useful or clarifying.

The current usage suggests that many "lenses" of critical theory are necessary to "see" the work of literature. But if we follow the logic of the metaphor, clearly only one lens is needed. That would be the lens that brings the object into sharp focus. All other lenses, to the extent that they deviate from those optics, would distort the object. For those wearing glasses to bring objects into the correct focus, using other lenses proves defeating and futile. This is where the metaphor fails and fails quite spectacularly. The idea behind the metaphor might be that multiple perspectives are needed to understand a work of art, but lenses are not perspectives. A single lens can be moved around an object to generate all kinds of perspectives. But, opthalmically, lenses are corrections to faulty vision, focusing or orienting eyes in need of correction to a standard, optimal vision.

Do those who use the metaphor mean optical filters like those photographers use? Photographically, these lenses render an object in various pronounced color tones. Many of the color-bathed images they produce might presumably be added together to create a single composite image. Yet, filters by definition strain out portions of the available light to create such effects. We know that filters miss important details, intentionally deviating from what is available to create varied effects.

Or we might expand the lens metaphor in the direction of vision augmentation devices. Maybe that is the sense in which those who use the metaphor mean it. That would include technological innovations like infrared, heat imaging, and more. The advantage of understanding the metaphor this way is that it captures a sense of the progress of knowledge to which we in the university long ago committed ourselves. But these cannot be critical "lenses," either, in the sense of multiple incompatible perspectives. These technologies open the wider spectrum of light radiation to human observers. They nonetheless view the same light band, and the object they illumine is still the same object. So these devices cannot be "lenses" in the current sense of the metaphor used in critical contacts.

As we sort through possible meanings, it becomes apparent that critics who talk about the literary "lens" seem to mean the metaphor to signify multiple perspectives. But this is also problematic, as multiple perspectives have little to do with lenses since, as noted, any single lens can generate multiple perspectives. As deficiently thought through as the metaphor is, the underlying idea of multiple incompatible perspectives is troublesome. It raises the specter of interpretive relativism-which may not in itself sound objectionable-but the perpetual ambiguity and confusing chaos that relativism creates inevitably leads to textual interventionism.

Maybe it is not a lens but more like a recipe. Maybe critics mix in ingredients to make new concoctions. Maybe they make something new with a different look, taste, and texture. Why not stir some dogma into our reading? Why not revolutionary fervor or the sensibility of another place and time? For one thing, there are very good hermeneutical reasons not to do so. For another, there are good alchemical reasons not to do so. Lye when mixed with one ingredient makes a mild cleanser for the skin; with another it dissolves human flesh. Don't we still need to listen to and understand one another, not only if we are to be educated people, but if we are going to live with one another in society? Otherwise, we are all just revolutionaries who continue to batter one another in every classroom, every social media encounter, every time we talk to one another or pick up a book.

Or if not like a recipe, maybe a lens is a kind of medical enhancement device. Doctors prescribe lenses. Maybe the prescribed lens uses digital augmented reality to overlay a preferred form and message. Or maybe it is more like a pharmaceutical pill or ointment that when applied makes me feel like the text agrees with me? But before we begin the work of criticism, we must certainly read a work to understand it. I find that too many students who adopt this reading-with-a-lens approach are losing the ability to read literature. They do not know how literary conventions convey meaning and that literature is a unique use of language that speaks a meaning over and above ordinary language. Too many students have been taught how to use a lens to find the oppressor, for instance, but somehow that singular focus leads away from other matters of which the text speaks.

At a sentence and discourse level, too many university students cannot engage a literary text. They are taught to favor partisan simplicity over complexity. They are taught to pass over the ways authors use tone and a variety of viewpoints to explore complex issues that confront us as human beings. Sometimes those issues they can immediately relate to; sometimes not. But as they lose the ability to have a primary experience in their reading, they lose what other minds and other cultures offer them. They miss the richness of figurative language that captures all kinds of ambivalences and intersections of human will and aspiration they might find there. Sometimes I wonder if what the critics call a lens really is a lens at all. I find it interesting that these students don't need a lens to read what the critics say. If that is the case, maybe the lenses critics advocate for are lenses after all: maybe they are cyborg lenses that sketch the barest outline around objects to find that one thing they are programmed to find. "Must find John Conner!"

But this is not so much seeing as it is critical monomania. Whatever it is, it is hardly critical anymore since to see the same thing every time we read is as critical as taking a ride on Uncle Toby's hobby horse. Is a lens a kind of tunnel vision? Maybe the purpose of the lens is to conceal? Maybe it is like the card sharp's colored lenses that screen out the ornate designs on the backs of cards to display instead a hidden code.

In this connection, I think of the critic Christopher Norris, who says in effect that we can't read texts anymore, but we can read ideologies. Is this looking at a work of literature through a "lens," or is it a surreptitious switching of meanings in which literature is treated as appearance and the critical theory reality? Maybe all writers of texts produce only "surface" and all writers of theories only "depth"? In this case, what the critic says is more "real" than what the text "appears" to say. Consequently, does the critical lens "write the text," in Stanley Fish's sense, or does it rewrite it? Perhaps a lens is a set rose-colored glasses or maybe a terministic screen. Maybe it is one of those mood spectacles or illusion glasses we find at parties. How about a kaleidoscopic lens with bits of sea shell, glitter, and tiny shapes rattling at one end to produce a captivating image at the other? Maybe our chosen lens produces an Escher pattern that tessellates across the field of vision, covering everything in sight? All sorts of lenses are available to us, and the Dutchman's interlocking angels and demons explain an awful lot, after all.

The problem with lenses is that with them students don't know what they know. A friend who went to medical school said he worked in the clinic his first year. When I asked, "Isn't there a danger that might lead to malpractice," he answered, "They trust us to know what we don't know." Our students in literary studies outfitted with lenses don't have that same epistemic circumspection. This kind of awareness is greater than that which any lens could provide. I don't blame these students as much as I do the critics and others in the profession who promote the lens as an interpretative carte blanche. Is a lens simply what the text would say if someone with my philosophy or political persuasion wrote it? To metaphorize what they want to say about a text as a lens is to make it official. Henceforth, it is unquestionable. Since we're searching for metaphors, maybe we should include those characters in Tolkien whose superior minds seek lower intelligences to carry out their will, a chief difference between wizards and orcs. Or maybe reading is a kind of ventriloquism act? Metaphors abound for the kind of reading practiced in our profession today.

Do those who replace the meaning of a literary work with some understanding of the world they favor regard the new meaning as somehow communicable and stable? Do they then present this "real" meaning to the rest of us to see without the aid of "lenses"? Or do they argue that all not only literary works but also literary interpretations require lenses, so we might as well adopt their lens as well as any other? Should we expect a battle of the lenses, a hermeneutic ground war where perspectival possibilities multiply and clash because other new critics with their respective lenses insist on the primacy of their visions? In the end, how many acts of lens-viewing are a matter of withdrawing the veritable message in the bottle and simply inserting our own?

Of course, the pluralism we espouse as critics need not be a tendentious process of self-validating and unquestioned perspectives that turn the text into something other than it is, nor a competition for recognition in Kojève's "struggle to the death for pure prestige." For Coleridge's definition of beauty as "multeity in unity," plurality in Western philosophy and art was heretofore seen as the complex variety of things integrated in a much larger whole, even if the identity of the whole was unknown. Only in the postmodern did that change. Deleuze was the principal philosopher for the "fundamental" nature, as he described it, of discontinuity. But even though the discourse of discontinuity currently dominates academia, there is a pressing need for a semantic-cognitive opening in which evidence and the remaining laws of logic help us sort through the teeming plurality that overruns us even on a practical level each day. Or does our egalitarianism extend to every idea and impression we have irrespective of its plausibility and moral payoff? Truth is not so much plural as things manifesting themselves in a variety of ways, and individual perceivers with their various histories and values multiply perceptions as they interact with the world and one another. In such cases, we rightly respect plurality as a means to access larger unified truths and discern broader patterns. When we do so, we account for the narrowness of singular viewpoints.

In the matter of the interpretation of art, we take these "perceptions" or "perspectives"-not lenses-and we add them up to see what greater understanding they offer. Otherwise, we might as well have one eye on one side of our head arguing with the other about which one is right. Even two lenses on a single pair of spectacles provide this function in the most obvious of ways. Each vantage point is partial, knows its vision is partial, nor will and does not insist its one lens is true, as if that ended the story. Instead, each coordinates its lesser information with the lesser information of the other as it seeks areas of agreement. Insofar as their lesser information overlaps, they reconcile what they know with one another to attain more knowledge. Their divergence exists for the sake of convergence, their multiplicity for the sake of unity.

Even in our fractious age, perceivers seek to reconcile the various inputs of their five senses. Scientists seek a unified field theory. And can we literary critics still seek a unified understanding of our subject matter as well, even as we allow for the personal response of the individual viewer, which can be integrated in some larger account? When we find that information in one place does not square with that in another, we search for a deeper unity that connects them. Is that unity not requisite to the knowledge toward which we aim in our institutions of higher learning?

The destructive legacy of a poststructuralist insistence on fundamental discontinuity has locked us in the untenable position of Borges's Funes, for whom "[n]ot only was it difficult ... to see that the generic symbol 'dog' took in all the dissimilar individuals of all shapes and sizes, it irritated him that the 'dog' of three-fourteen in the afternoon, seen in profile, should be indicated by the same noun as the dog of three-fifteen, seen frontally." The effect of the doctrine of fundamental discontinuity has been to disregard the fertile dance of the one and the many. Yet, neither understanding nor complexity exists without that dance. Our best contemporary artists still move effortlessly with it. As the poststructuralist doctrine of discontinuity ill disposes us toward two thousand years of our civilization's art and philosophy that coordinates the one with the other, it also ill disposes us to other persons as genuine sources of knowledge, treating us all as discontinuous points of either opposition or assent. I think rather of the great game theorist John Nash who in our time used one bright corner of a diseased mind to leverage his remarkable understanding of the world, adding some perspectives and subtracting others, as he eliminated blind spots and repudiated illusions.

Is there something in this metaphor of the lens that can isolate us from one another and from the past? Not if it is meant as clarifying sight rather than radical reinterpretation and unquestioned alternativeness. But these latter meanings and not the former seem to be advanced and even celebrated in our time. I am afraid that the thinkers who gave us ideology in the place of ideas now give us lenses instead of sight. Critical intervention passes too quickly over what is said to what the critic believes ought to be said. If this is so, the lens metaphor goes a long way to replace both ideas and seeing, thinking and sight-the organic processes of observation, comparison, and patient interpretation of what literary works convey.

Is there a better metaphor than either lens or tool? While it tempting to think of others, perhaps this is one time in literary studies we should reflect on the literal. Literature requires literacy. Literacy at a minimum means the ability to generate meanings out of all manner of texts ourselves. Therefore, insofar as criticism usurps this role and interjects its own meanings, it functions as a substitute for literacy. While literacy comes at the end of a long process of learning that culminates in complex crossroads of cognitive awareness, certain critical lenses offer to short-change the process with quick answers and interpretive schemes that explain far too much away as it foregrounds the critic's own view of the world. Immersive and reflective readers ought to move not only across texts but equally among ideas in the history of thought, not simply reduce the variety of what they find there to the sameness of the critic's singular vision in our own time. Increasingly, many students and authors of manuscripts who come to me for review treat criticism as a perfectly legitimate blinder to the things that literate readers of literature ought to know. We appear to be approaching a place in Western intellectual tradition far beyond earlier tendencies either to allegorize or syncretize, where to read a text is to shift the ground of discussion and translate what it says into our own preferred critical idiom and worldview.

Therefore, it is not surprising that the truth value of lenses rarely comes up in the metaphor, whether these interpretations and accounts are hermeneutically sound or not. The same critical lens keeps seeing the same thing over and over, or as overzealous students say, "It's everywhere I look!" Interesting in this regard is how the metaphor of the lens stands as the perfect inverse of the traditional tale of the four blind men and the elephant. In that tale, narrow perspectives mean limited information, and limited information takes the logical misstep of mistaking the part for the whole. Saramago's Blindness updates the tale in a horrifying parable that shows how deep the mistake still runs in our nature. The synecdoche error dogs us too much these days as we grapple with the meaning of the postmodern and what might await us after it.

Regarding our professional pursuits, then, perhaps such errors and faulty metaphors follow naturally from critical orthodoxies when they are uncritically retained. If metaphors are supposed to sharpen our understanding, not obfuscate it, then the lens metaphor falls short. The toolbox metaphor was beset by its own problems, too, but not for the reasons that gave us the lens metaphor. Still, we literate readers, to the degree we consider ourselves such, should be more aware of our metaphors. Not swept along by them. Least of all, blinded by them.

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Believing Is Seeing: The "Lens" Metaphor in Critical Theory

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Hardly a day goes by that I don't hear someone speak of literary theories as so many lenses one pulls from the metaphorical camera bag. Or maybe they are f

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How digital technology improves mental health services

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How digital technology improves mental health services

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How digital technology can be used to improve mental health services for patients and staff

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Opportunities & Innovations brought to Education as a result of Digital Tranformation

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Akash Takyar, CEO LeewayHertz
https://www.leewayhertz.com/digital-transformation-in-education/

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Individuals are increasingly „expected and encouraged to be self-reflexive, or to view their lives as projects“  (Lupton (2015), 28).

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Digital divide throughout the world and why it causes inequality

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ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) offer many advantages: greater access to information, cost reduction in the labour sector, greater connectivity between people, etc. However, digitalisation is not happening equally all over the world, because imbalance exists and this is known as the digital divide.

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in the sense that there are increasingly new ways in which to interact and do business (see  Dillman (2001), 1345).
"[W]ithout talking to another human being, products can be purchased, library books can be renewed [...]"  (Dillman (2001), 1345).

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Digital Transformation & Sustainability go hand in hand

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There are several examples of digital technology being used to help address global climate change concerns or to promote sustainable and creative development in order to promote change.

Big data analytics and other digital sustainability activities are directly contributing to the achievement of global ESG (environmental, social, and governance) goals set by international and transnational governing bodies, such as the Paris Climate Agreement targets for 2030 and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. As a result, we're witnessing shifts in business models and the promotion of a new degree of institutional accountability.

Posted in Sustainability on 27 September 2021
By Sara Cudicio, Senior Sustainability Consultant

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Digital inclusion is the concept that all individuals and groups should have the opportunity, equipment, and technology to access the internet and interact with content.

Digital equity is the concept that people need digital access in order to be fully engaged in their civic and cultural life and to increase their options for growth and learning. For example, people who have digital access can easily apply for jobs, learn what’s happening in their communities, read news from around the world, and research educational opportunities.

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FEAR OF MISSING OUT vs JOY OF MISSING OUT

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According to Patrick J. McGinnis, who invented the term more than 15 years ago, FOMO (Fear of missing out) is the unwanted anxiety caused by the perception that others have experiences better than yours or that you are excluded from memorable collective experiences. Although this term has been around for years, the digital transformation of our ages - especially the blossom of social media - has intensified it, leading more than half of social media users to fear that they will miss out on important status updates, news and events (Eventbrite, 2015).

Jomo (Joy of missing out), on the other hand, refers to the gratifying feeling you get when you escape - mainly virtual - activities of your social group and spend time doing exactly what you most want to do. The term was coined by Anil Dash in 2012 and has been used ever since. Digital transformation has caused many to experience digital overwhelm making the need for JOMO more essential - and at the same time difficult to achieve - than ever.

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Traditionally a process of reformation into the original shape of men as given by each religion through a leading figure (as is Christ for Christianity, Buddha for Buddhism etc), modern spirituality seems to arise from humanistic psychology, certain mystical and esoteric traditions as well as Eastern religions (see: Houtman, Dick; Aupers, Stef (2007), "The Spiritual Turn and the Decline of Tradition: The Spread of Post-Christian Spirituality in 14 Western Countries, 1981–2000", Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 46 (3): 305–20, doi:10.1111/j.1468-5906.2007.00360.x) It emphasises the individual and includes notions of personal growth or transformation; it can also be defined as the search for the ultimate meaning and purpose in life. (see: Snyder, C.R.; Lopez, Shane J. (2007), Positive Psychology, Sage Publications, Inc., ISBN 978-0-7619-2633-7)

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Traditional forms of spiritualism have given way to new forms of search for meaning, purpose and fulfillment. That also means they could have been replaced by materialism etc.

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(traditional) mystical systems (religion, superstition, etc)

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(traditional) mystical systems (religion, superstition, etc)

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The best way to show how Critical Theory offers a distinctive philosophical approach is to locate it historically in German Idealism and its aftermath. For Marx and his generation, Hegel was the last in the grand tradition of philosophical thought able to give us secure knowledge of humanity and history on its own. The issue for Left Hegelians and Marx was then somehow to overcome Hegelian "theoretical" philosophy, and Marx argues that it can do so only by making philosophy "practical," in the sense of changing practices by which societies realize their ideals. Once reason was thoroughly socialized and made historical, historicist skepticism emerged at the same time, attempting to relativize philosophical claims about norms and reason to historically and culturally variable forms of life. Critical Theory developed a nonskeptical version of this conception, linking philosophy closely to the human and social sciences. In so doing, it can link empirical and interpretive social science to normative claims of truth, morality and justice, traditionally the purview of philosophy. While it defends the emphasis on normativity and universalist ambitions found in the philosophical tradition, it does so within the context of particular sorts of empirical social research, with which it has to cooperate if it is to understand such normative claims within the current historical context. After presenting the two main versions of this conception of philosophy, I turn to an illuminating example of how this cooperative relation between philosophy and the social sciences works from the point of view of the main figures in Critical Theory who sought to develop it: the critique of ideology, a form of criticism which if generalized threatens to undermine the critical stance itself as one more ideology. Even if Critical Theorists are united in a common philosophical project, this example shows the large differences between the first and second generation concerning the normative justification of social criticism.

In the modern era, philosophy defines its distinctive role in relation to the sciences. While for Locke philosophy was a mere "underlaborer," for Kant it had a loftier status. As Rorty and others have put it, transcendental philosophy has two distinct roles: first, as the tribunal of Reason, the ultimate court of appeal before which disciplines stand and must justify themselves and secondly, as the domain for normative questions left out of naturalistic inquiry. In light of this ability to judge the results of the sciences, philosophy can also organize knowledge, assigning to each of them their proper sphere and scope. The Kantian solution denies the need for direct cooperation with the sciences on issues related to normativity, since these were determined independently through transcendental analysis of the universal and necessary conditions for reason in its theoretical and practical employment. Echoes of the subsequent post-Hegelian criticisms of Kantian transcendental philosophy are found in the early work of Horkheimer and Marcuse. Indeed, Horkheimer criticizes "traditional theory" in light of the rejection of its representational view of knowledge and its nonhistorical subject. Echoing Marx in The German Ideology, Horkheimer insists that for a critical theory the world and subjectivity in all its forms have developed with the life processes of society (Horkheimer 1972b [1992, 245]). Much like certain naturalists today, he argued that "materialism requires the unification of philosophy and science," thus denying any substantive distinction between science and philosophy (Horkheimer 1993, 34). As Horkheimer understood the task of Critical Theory, philosophical problems are preserved by taking a role in defining problems for research, and philosophical reflection retains a privileged role in organizing the results of empirical research into a unified whole.

This understanding of the relation of philosophy and the sciences remains broadly Kantian. Even while rejecting the role of philosophy as transcendental judge, he still endorses its normative role, to the extent that it still has the capacity to organize the claims of empirical forms of knowledge and to assign each a role in the normative enterprise of reflection on historically and socially contextualized reason. This unstable mixture of naturalism with a normative philosophical orientation informed much of the critical social science of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s.

According to this conception of materialism, Critical Theory could operate with a theoretical division of labor in which philosophy's normative stance could criticize the embodiments of reason and morality according to their internal criteria. At least for modern societies, such an enterprise of "immanent critique" was possible (see, for example, Horkheimer 1993, 39). However, Horkheimer and Marcuse saw the skeptical and relativist stance of the emerging sociology of knowledge, particularly that of Karl Mannheim, as precisely opposed to that of Critical Theory. As Marcuse puts it, "sociology that is only interested in the dependent and limited nature of consciousness has nothing to do with truth. While useful in many ways it has falsified the interest and goal of any critical theory" (Marcuse 1969 152). As opposed to merely debunking criticism, "a critical theory is concerned with preventing the loss of truth that past knowledge has labored to attain." Given Critical Theory's orientation to human emancipation, it seeks to contextualize philosophical claims to truth and moral universality without reducing them to social and historical conditions. Horkheimer formulates this skeptical fallacy that informed much of the sociologically informed relativism of his time in this way: "That all our thoughts, true or false, depend on conditions that can change in no way affects the validity of science. It is not clear why the conditioned character of thought should affect the truth of a judgment-why shouldn't insight be just as conditioned as error?" (Horkheimer 1993, 141). The core claim here is that fallibilism is different from relativism, suggesting that it is possible to distinguish between truth and the context of justification of claims to truth.

Faced with a sociological naturalism that relativized claims to truth and justice are necessary for social criticism, the challenge could be answered by detranscendentalizing truth without losing its normativity (Horkheimer 1993, 6; McCarthy, in McCarthy and Hoy 1994, 10). Indeed it is relativism that depends on an implausible and ahistorical form of detachment and impartiality, especially expressed in its methodological commitments to "reverential empathy and description." The skepticism offered by historicism and the sociology of knowledge is ultimately merely theoretical, the skepticism of an observer who takes the disengaged view from nowhere. Once the skeptic has to take up the practical stance, alternatives to such paper doubt become inevitable. Indeed, the critic must identify just whose practical stance best reveals these possibilities as agents for social transformation of current circumstances. As I point out in the next section, the Frankfurt School most often applied ideology critique to liberal individualism, pointing out its contextual limitations that lead to reductionist and pernicious interpretations of democratic ideals.

Despite the force of these antirelativist and antiskeptical arguments, two problems emerge in claims made by Horkheimer and Marcuse to underwrite some "emphatic" conception of truth or justice. First, philosophy is given the task of organizing social research and providing its practical aims even in the absence of the justification of its superior capacities. A more modest and thoroughly empirical approach would be more appropriate and defensible. Second, the source of this confidence seems to be practical, that critics must immanently discover those transformative agents whose struggles take up these normative contents of philosophy and attempt to realize them. But once this practical possibility no longer seems feasible, then this approach would either be purely philosophical or it would turn against the potentialities of the present. Indeed, during the rise of fascism in the Second World War and the commodified culture afterwards, the Frankfurt School became skeptical of the possibility of agency, as the subjective conditions for social transformation were on their view undermined.

It is clear that in Dialectic of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno abandoned this interdisciplinary materialist approach with its emphasis on cooperation with the social sciences (1982, xi). Adorno and Horkheimer did not to deny the achievements of the Enlightenment, but rather wanted to show that it had "self-destructive tendencies," that its specific social, cultural and conceptual forms realized in modern Europe "contained its own possibility of a reversal that is universally apparent today" (Adorno and Horkheimer 1982, xiii). Since Adorno and Horkheimer planned to offer a positive way out of the dialectic of Enlightenment at the time they wrote these words, this reversal is by no means inevitable. Even if their specific historical story of the emergence of Enlightenment reason out of myth is no longer so convincing, it is not enough to say with Habermas that The Dialectic of Enlightenment did not "do justice to the rational content of cultural modernity" (Habermas 1987, 103). For the positive task of avoiding the reversal of Enlightenment, reconstructing the rational content of modernity is not enough, since the issue is not to affirm its universalism, but its self-critical and emancipatory capacity. If the issue is the self-correcting capacity of the Enlightenment, two questions emerge: how is it undermined? Where do we locate the exercise of this capacity? This is the "Enlightenment problem," the solution to which is twofold: to reconstruct those human capacities that have such reflexivity built into them and to tie the operation of Enlightenment institutions to the conditions of their successful exercise.

Against this skeptical predicament of the first generation of Critical Theory, it could be said without exaggeration that Habermas's basic philosophical endeavor from Knowledge and Human Interests to The Theory of Communicative Action has been to develop a more modest, fallibilist, empirical account of the philosophical claim to universality and rationality. This more modest approach rids Critical Theory of its vestiges of transcendental philosophy, pushing it in a naturalistic direction. Such naturalism identifies more specific forms of social scientific knowledge that help in developing an analysis of the general conditions of rationality manifested in various human capacities and powers. Thus, Habermas's alternative sees practical knowledge, or reason in the robust sense, as it is "embodied in cognition, speech and action" (Habermas 1984, 10). Habermas's calls for particular "reconstructive sciences," whose aim it is to render theoretically explicit the intuitive, pretheoretical know-how underlying such basic human competences as speaking and understanding, judging, and acting. Unlike Kant's transcendental analysis of the conditions of rationality, such sciences yield knowledge that is not necessary but hypothetical, not a priori but empirical, not certain but fallible. They are nevertheless directed to universal structures and conditions and raise universal, but defeasible claims to an account of practical reason. In this way, Habermas undermines both of the traditional Kantian roles for philosophy and brings them into a fully cooperative relation to the social sciences. This can be seen in the clear differences between his account of the critique of ideology, which is at once contextualist and antirelativist but also underwrites its own normativity in ways that Horkheimer and Marcuse's more nearly transcendental account could not, given the inevitable tension between philosophical ideals and the historical conditions of current societies and their practices.

Like many other such theories, the theory of communicative action offers its own distinctive definition of rationality. In good pragmatist fashion, Habermas's definition is epistemic, practical, and intersubjective. For Habermas, rationality consists not so much in the possession of knowledge and thus primarily concerned with the consistency and content of one's beliefs, but rather in "how speaking and acting subjects acquire and use knowledge" (Habermas, 1984, 11). Such a broad definition suggests that the theory could be developed through explicating the general and formal conditions of validity in knowing and reaching understanding through language, and this task falls primarily on "formal pragmatics." As one among many different "reconstructive sciences," such a reconstruction of speech is inherently normative, in the sense that it is one of the disciplines that reconstructs a common domain: "the know-how of subjects who are capable of speech and action, who are attributed the capacity to produce valid utterances, and who consider themselves capable of distinguishing (at least intuitively) between valid and invalid expressions" (Habermas 1990, 31). The positive goal of such a theory is not only to provide an account of rationality based on this know-how that is rich enough to grasp uses of reason in all their variety, yet also normative enough to be able to clarify the necessary conditions for its practical employment as well as a critical analysis of the "pathologies" that occur when these conditions fail to obtain.

More than just reconstructing an implicitly normative know-how, Habermas is clear that such reconstructive sciences have a "quasi-transcendental" status by specifying very general and formal conditions of successful communication. In this way, their concern with normativity and with the abilities needed for rationality in Habermas's practical and social sense permits them to acquire a critical role. Certainly, the goal of the reconstructive sciences is theoretical knowledge: they make such practical know-how explicit. But insofar as they are capable of explicating the conditions for valid or correct utterances, they also explain why some utterances are invalid, some speech acts unsuccessful, and some argumentation inadequate. Thus, such sciences "also explain deviant cases and through this indirect authority acquire a critical function as well" (Habermas, 1990, 32). This authority then permits the theory of rationality to underwrite critical claims about social and political practices, to show how their functioning violates not only the espoused rules but also the conditions of rationality.

Such an approach can be applied to normative features of democratic practices. Rather than only providing a set of explicit principles of justification and institutional decision rules, democracy is also a particular structure of free and open communication. Ideology restricts or limits such processes of communication and undermines the conditions of success within them. Ideology as distorted communication affects both the social conditions in which democratic discussion takes place and the processes of communication that go on within them. The theory of ideology, therefore, analyzes the ways in which linguistic-symbolic meanings are used to encode, produce, and reproduce relations of power and domination, even within institutional spheres of communication and interaction governed by norms that make democratic ideals explicit in normative procedures and constraints. As a reconstruction of the potentially correct insights behind Marx's exaggerated rejection of liberalism, the theory of distorted communication is therefore especially suited to the ways in which meanings are used to reproduce power even under explicit rules of equality and freedom. This is not to say that explicit rules are unimportant: they make it possible for overt forms of coercion and power to be constrained, the illegitimacy of which requires no appeal to norms implicit in practices.

Democratic norms of freedom can be made explicit in various rights, including civil rights of participation and free expression. Such norms are often violated explicitly in exercises of power for various ends, such as wealth, security, or cultural survival. Besides these explicit rights, such coercion also violates the communicative freedom expressed in ignoring the need to pass decisions through the taking of yes/no attitudes by participants in communication. Habermas calls such speech that is not dependent on these conditions of communicative rationality "distorted communication." For example, powerful economic groups have historically been able to attain their agency goals without explicitly excluding topics from democratic discussion but by implied threats and other nondeliberative means (Przworski and Wallerstein 1988, 12-29; Bohman 1997, 338-339). Threats of declining investments block redistributive schemes, so that credible threats circumvent the need to convince others of the reasons for such policies or to put some issue under democratic control. Similarly, biases in agenda setting within organizations and institutions limit scope of deliberation and restrict political communication by defining those topics that can be successfully become the subject of public agreement (Bohman 1990). In this way, it is easy to see how such a reconstructive approach connects directly to social scientific analyses of the consistency of democratic norms with actual political behavior.

This theory of ideology as distorted communication opens up the possibility of a different relation of theoretical and practical knowledge than Habermas has suggested so far. His approach uses formal pragmatics philosophically to reflect upon norms and practices that are already explicit in justifications in various sorts of argumentation or second-order communication. Such reflection has genuine practical significance in yielding explicit rules governing discursive communication (such as rules of argumentation), which in turn can be used for the purpose of designing and reforming deliberative and discursive institutions (Habermas 1996, 230). It is easily overlooked that such rules are only part of the story; they make explicit and institutionalize norms that are already operative in correct language use. Such implicit norms of well-formed and communicatively successful utterances are not identical with the explicit rules of argumentation.

These claims about norms raise two difficulties. First, there is a potential regress of rules, that is, that explicit rules requires further rules to apply them, and so on. Second, this approach cannot capture how norms are often only implicit in practices rather than explicitly expressed (Brandom 1994, 18-30). Here Habermas sides with Pettit in seeing the central function of explicit norms as creating a commons that can serve as the basis for institutionalizing norms, a space in which the content of norms and concepts can be put up for rational reflection and revision (Pettit 1992, Habermas 1990). Making such implicit norms explicit is thus also the main task of the interpretive social scientist and is a potential source of social criticism; it is then the task of the participant-critic in the democratic public sphere to change them. There is one more possible role for the philosophically informed social critic. As we have seen in the case of ideological speech, the reconstructive sciences "also explain deviant cases and through this indirect authority acquire a critical function as well" (Habermas, 1990, 32).

In this section, I have discussed claims that are distinctive of the metaphilosophy of Critical Theorists of both generations of the Frankfurt School and illustrated the ways in which critical normativity can be exercised in their differing models of the critique of ideology. Critical Theorists attempt to fulfill potentially two desiderata at the same time: first, they want to maintain the normativity of philosophical conceptions such as truth or justice, while at the same time they want to examine the contexts in which they have developed and may best be promoted practically. I argued that the first generation theorists avoided the relativism of sociologies of knowledge such as Mannheim's only to fall into a practical skepticism about the feasibility of agents acting upon such norms in current contexts. Habermas's conception of the cooperation between philosophy and the social sciences in rational reconstruction of practical knowledge allows him to articulate a normative conception of "real democracy" more fully and to develop a social scientifically informed conception of democracy that is an alternative to current liberal practices. This project shifts the goal of critical social inquiry from human emancipation as such, to the primary concern with democratic institutions as the location for the realization of ideals of freedom and equality. The limits on any such realization may prove to be not merely ideological: Critical Theory is also interested in those social facts and circumstances that constrain the realization of the ideal democracy and force us to reconsider its normative content. While such an account of the relation between facts and norms answers the sociological skepticism of Weber and others about the future of democracy, it may be based on an overly limited account of social facts.

In its initial phases Critical Theory attempted to develop a normative notion of "real democracy" that was contrasted with actual political forms in liberal societies. A democratic society would be rational, because in it individuals could gain "conscious control" over social processes that affect them and their life chances. To the extent that such an aim is possible at all, it required that human beings become "producers of their [social life] in its totality" (Horkheimer 1972b [1992, 244]). Such a society then becomes a "true" or expressive totality, overcoming the current "false totality," an antagonistic whole in which the genuine social needs and interests cannot be expressed or developed (Jay 1984). Such a positive, expressivist ideal of a social whole is not, however, antiliberal, since it shares with liberalism the commitment to rationalism and universalism. The next phase in the development of Critical Theory took up the question of antidemocratic trends. This development of the Frankfurt School interpretation of the limits on democracy as an ideal of human freedom was greatly influenced by the emergence of fascism in the 1930s, one of the primary objects of their social research. Much of this research was concerned with antidemocratic trends, including increasingly tighter connections between states and the market in advanced capitalist societies, the emergence of the fascist state and the authoritarian personality. Horkheimer came to see that these antidemocratic trends gradually undermined the realization of an expressive whole, with the consequence that "the situation of the individual is hopeless," that the subjective conditions for exercising freedom and achieving solidarity were being eroded by an increasingly totalizing social reification.

As first generation Critical Theorists saw it in the 1940s, this process of reification occurs at two different levels. First, it concerned a sophisticated analysis of the contrary psychological conditions underlying democracy and authoritarianism; second, this analysis was linked to a social theory that produced an account of objective, large-scale, and long-term historical processes of reification. If these facts and trends are true, then the idea of a "true totality" is a plausible critical category. However, this concept is ill suited for democratic theory due to a lack of clarity with regard to the underlying positive political ideal of Critical Theory. Finally, in reaction to these normative failures, Habermas seeks to develop an intermediate level of analysis and a new normative conception in the historical analysis of the emergence of the "public sphere" ( Öffentlichkeit). As his later and more fully developed normative theory of democracy based on macrosociological social facts about modern societies shows, Habermas offers a modest and liberal democratic ideal based on the public use of reason within the empirical constraints of modern complexity and differentiation. This social theory may make it difficult for him to maintain some aspects of radical democracy as an expressive and rational ideal that first generation critical theorists saw as a genuine alternative to liberalism.

Except for passages on "real democracy" as the achievement of a rational society, many of the Frankfurt School's writings on democracy are concerned with developing a critique of liberal ideology reminiscent of "The Jewish Question." Horkheimer puts his criticism of bourgeois negative liberty in these terms: "The limited freedom of the bourgeois individual puts on the illusory form of perfect freedom and autonomy" (Horkheimer 1972b [1992, 211]). Horkheimer criticizes the modern philosophical and legal subject as abstract, detached, and ahistorical; whatever freedom and autonomy actors have, they are best understood as "definite individuals" whose freedom is exercised in relation others and in historically specific societies. The freedom of real individuals can only be thought of in a holistic way, "in the resultant web of relationships with the social totality and with nature." Like all good ideology critiques, then, this criticism of liberalism is immanent, using the liberal norms and values against their historical realization in specific institutions. Nonetheless, this ideology critique recognized that liberalism was still, as Marcuse put it, a "rationalist theory of society." Whatever its successor, the new form would have to pass the normative tests that fascism and other emerging forms of antiliberalism do not: this new unity "would have to prove itself before the tribunal of individuals, to show that their needs and potentialities are realized within it" (Marcuse 1968, 7). Using Hegelian terminology, Critical Theorists came to regard advanced capitalist societies as a "totality," in which the tight integration of states and markets threatened to eliminate the space for freedom. While the emergence of fascism is possible evidence for this fact, it is also an obvious instance in which reliance on the internal criticism of liberalism is no longer adequate.

The shift in the Frankfurt School to such external forms of criticism from 1940 onwards is not confined to the fascist state. With the development of capitalism in its monopoly form, the liberal heritage loses its rational potential as the political sphere increasingly functionalized to the market and its reified social relationships. In this way the critique of liberalism shifts away from the normative underpinnings of current democratic practices to the ways in which the objective conditions of reification undermine the psychological and cultural presuppositions of democratic change and opposition. Such a society is now a "wholly false totality." The work of Adorno and Horkheimer in this period shows the philosophical consequences of this shift, especially in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) and The Eclipse of Reason (1947).

One of the central claims of Dialectic of Enlightenment concerns the "entwinement of myth and Enlightenment," as providing a deep historical treatment of the genesis of modern reason and freedom and how they turn into their opposites. Rather than being liberating and progressive, reason has become dominating and controlling with the spread of instrumental reason. Liberal institutions do not escape this process and are indeed part of it with their institutionalization of self-interest and self-preservation, tending toward a "totally administered society." In Eclipse of Reason Horkheimer turns this critique of instrumental reason against liberal democracy. He argues that the liberal tradition that Marcuse argued needed to be preserved only retained its normative force on the metaphysical foundation of "objective reason." However grounded, liberalism depended on subjectivizing reason and objective moral principles; subjects are proclaimed "autonomous" all the while they sink into the heteronomy of market relations. The "inevitable" tendency of liberalism to collapse into fascism "can be derived, apart from any economic causes, from the inner contradiction between the subjectivist principle of self-interest and the idea of reason that it is supposed to express" (Horkheimer 1987, 21). Shorn of its objective content, democracy is reduced to mere majority rule and public opinion to some measurable quantity. The argument here is primarily genealogical (thus based on a story of historical origin and development) and not grounded in social science; it is a reconstruction of the history of Western reason or of liberalism in which calculative, instrumental reason drives out the utopian content of universal solidarity. Some nondominating, alternative conception is exhibited in Horkheimer's religiously influenced ideal of identification with all suffering creatures or Adorno's idea of mimetic reconciliation with the other found primarily in art (Horkheimer 1972a; Adorno 1973). These analyses were also complemented by an analysis of the emergence of state capitalism and of the culture industry that replaces the need for consent and even the pseudo-consent of ideology.

Some of the more interesting social scientific analyses of fascism that the Frankfurt School produced in this period were relatively independent of such a genealogy of reason. The first is the analysis of political economy of advanced, administered capitalist societies, with Franz Neumann providing a dissenting view that no state can completely control social and economic processes in the ways that might be more consistent with Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of instrumental reason. Especially interesting were empirical investigations into the "authoritarian" and "democratic" personalities, which provided a microsociology of democratic and antidemocratic character traits (Adorno et al. 1953). Perhaps one of more striking results of this study is that the core of the democratic personality is a particular emotional or affective organization: "if fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy" (Adorno et al 1953, 480). Thus, long-term historical cultural development and macro- and micro-sociological trends work against the democratic ideal. The sources of resistance to these trends are increasingly found at the level of what Foucault would call "micropolitics."

Whatever the merits of such general historical frameworks for critical interpretations of the present, the internal difficulty for a critical theory is that "real democracy," the goal of emancipatory criticism, demands a richer set of practical and theoretical resources, including institutional possibilities. What was needed was an alternative conception of rationality that is not exhausted by the decline of objective reason into subjective self-interest. This basic problem of first generation Critical Theory has been the life-long theme of the work of Jürgen Habermas, for whom the publicity and more generally the public sphere ( Öffentlichkeit), occupies precisely the right conceptual space. Habermas also replaces the expressive totality of a fully democratic society with the ideal of "undamaged intersubjectivity" and of universal solidarity established through "communication free from domination." On the social theoretical side, totality is replaced by a conception of social complexity, which is not necessarily false or reifying. These shifts permit a more positive reassessment of the liberal tradition and its existing political institutions and open up the possibility of a critical sociology of the legitimation problems of the modern state. On the whole, Habermas marked the return to normative theory united with a broader use of empirical, reconstructive and interpretive social science. Above all, this version of Critical Theory required fully developing the alternative to instrumental reason, only sketched by Adorno or Horkheimer in religious and aesthetic form; for Habermas criticism is instead grounded in everyday communicative action. Indeed, he cam to argue that the social theory of the first generation, with its commitments to holism, could no long be reconciled with the historical story at the core of Critical Theory: the possible emergence of a more robust and genuine form of democracy

Habermas's rejection of the explanatory holism of the first generation of the Frankfurt School has both explanatory and normative implications. First, he brings categories of meaning and agency back into critical social theory, both of which were absent in the macro-sociological and depth psychological approaches that were favored in the post war period. This brings democratic potentials back into view, since democracy makes sense only within specific forms of interaction and association, from the public forum to various political institutions. Indeed, Habermas's first and perhaps most enduring work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas 1989/1961), traced the historical emergence of new forms of public interaction from the intimate sphere of the family, to coffee houses, salons, and finally to parliamentary debates. While linked ultimately to a narrative of its decline through the market and the administrative state, the core of such interaction and the critical and egalitarian potential of being part of a public whose members address one another as equals had for Habermas a nonideological, even "utopian" core (Habermas 1989, 88). Second, Habermas also developed an alternative sociology of modernity, in which social differentiation and pluralization are not pathological but positive features of modern societies (Habermas 1982, 1986). Indeed, the positive conception of complexity permits an analysis of the ways in which modern societies and their functional differentiation opens up democratic forms of self-organization independently of some possible expressively integrated totality. Such an ideal of an expressive totality and conscious self control over the production of the conditions of social life is replaced with publicity and mutual recognition within feasible discursive institutions.

This emphasis on the normative potential of modernity does not mean that modern political forms such as the state are not to be criticized. In Legitimation Crisis (1969), for example, Habermas argues not only that the demands of advanced capitalism restrict the scope and significance of democracy, but also that the state is "crisis ridden" and unable to solve structural problems of unemployment, economic growth, and environmental destruction. These crisis tendencies open up a space for contestation and deliberation by citizens and their involvement in new social movements. This criticism of the contemporary state is put in the context of a larger account of the relation between democracy and rationality. Contrary to "formal" democracy understood as majority rule, Habermas opposes "substantive democracy," which emphasizes the "genuine participation of citizens in political will formation" (Habermas 1975, 32). The relevant notion of rationality that can be applied to such a process is procedural and discursive; it is developed in terms of the procedural properties of communication necessary to make public will formation rational and thus for it to issue in a genuine rather than merely de facto consensus.

With such an expansion of Kantian practical reason, democracy is now grounded in the intersubjective structure of communication exhibited in the special form of reflective and reciprocal communication and public testing of claims to validity that Habermas calls "discourse." As communication about communication, discourse emerges in problematic situations in which new solutions must be sought in order to continue social cooperation. Democratic institutions have the proper reflexive structure and are thus discursive in this sense. In them, citizens deliberate as free and equal persons, for whom the legitimacy of the decision is related to the achievement of a "rational consensus." That is, a consensus is rational to the extent that it is based on a norm that could under ideal conditions be justified to all those who are affected by a decision. Early on Habermas called the full list of these counterfactual conditions "the ideal speech situation," although later it is clear that it is meant to provide a principled basis by which to assess the quality of agreements reached discursively.

One philosophical purpose of such a procedural conception of rationality is to refute value skeptics, who reduce politics to what Weber called the struggle between "gods and demons" (Weber 1949). Its purpose in social theory is to provide the basis for an account of cultural rationalization and learning in modernity. In normative theory proper, Habermas has from the start been suspicious of attempts to apply this fundamentally epistemological criterion of rationality directly to the structure of political institutions. As early as Theory and Practice (1966), Habermas distanced himself from Rousseau's claim that the general will can only be achieved in a direct, republican form of democracy. By failing to see that the ideal agreement of the social contract specifies only a certain procedural and reflexive level of justification, Rousseau confused "the introduction of a new principle of legitimacy with proposals for institutionalizing just rule" (Habermas 1979, 186). Indeed democratic principles need not be applied everywhere in the same way (Habermas 1973, 32-40). Instead, the realization of such norms has to take into account various social facts, including facts of pluralism and complexity (Habermas 1996, 474). For Habermas, no normative conception of democracy or law could be developed independently of a descriptively adequate model of contemporary society, lest it become a mere ought. Without this empirical and descriptive component, democratic norms become merely empty ideals and not the reconstruction of the rationality inherent in actual practices. I shall return to the problematic relation of social facts to democratic ideals in the next section in discussing Habermas's account of the philosophy of critical social science.

Another way in which this point about democratic legitimacy can be made is to distinguish the various uses to which practical reason may be put in various forms of discourse. Contrary to the account of legitimacy offered in Legitimation Crisis, Habermas later explicitly abandons the analogy between the justification of moral norms and democratic decision-making. Moral discourses are clearly restricted to questions of justice that can be settled impartially through a procedure of universalization (Habermas 1990, 43ff). The moral point of view abstracts from the particular identities of persons, including their political identities, and encompasses an ideally universal audience of all humanity. Although politics and law include moral concerns within their scope, such as issues of basic human rights, the scope of justification in such practices can be restricted to the specific community of associated citizens and thus may appeal to culturally specific values shared by the participants.

There are at least three aspects of practical reason relevant to democratic deliberation: pragmatic, ethical, and moral uses of reason are employed with different objects (pragmatic ends, the interpretation of common values, and the just resolution of conflicts) and thus also different forms of validity (Habermas 1993, 1-18). Because of this variety, democratic discourses are often mixed and complex, often including various asymmetries of knowledge and information. Democratic deliberation is thus not a special case of moral judgment with all of its idealizing assumptions, but a complex discursive network with various sorts of argumentation, bargaining, and compromise (Habermas 1996, 286). What regulates their use is a principle at a different level: the public use of practical reason is self-referential and recursive in examining the conditions of its own employment. Given the social circumstances of large-scale and pluralistic modern societies, distinctively democratic deliberation requires the "medium of law," so that the results of deliberation must be expressed through law.

Habermas expresses the relevant differences among the uses of practical reason in morality and politics as sub-principles of the same principle of discursive justification, which he calls " D." D simply names a discursive procedure: "just those norms of action are valid if all persons affected could agree as participants in rational discourse" (Habermas 1996, 107). The moral principle " U " specifies that the rule of argumentation for moral discourse is univeralizability (Habermas 1990, 65-66). The more specific principle of democracy states that "only those laws may claim legitimacy that can meet with the agreement of all citizens in a discursive lawmaking procedure that is itself legally constituted" (Habermas 1996, 110). He argues that such a principle is at a different level than the moral principle, to the extent that its aim is primarily to establish a discursive procedure of legitimate law making and is a much weaker standard of agreement.

Nonetheless, even this democratic principle may still be too demanding, to the extent that it requires the agreement of all citizens (counterfactually) as a criterion of legitimacy. Habermas admits that in the case of cultural values we need not expect such agreement, and he even introduces compromise as a possible discursive outcome of democratic procedures. One way to genuinely weaken the principle would be to substitute cooperation for consensus and the outcome of the procedure: "a law then would be legitimate only if it could be agreed to in a fair and open deliberative process in which all citizens may freely continue to participate whatever the outcome" (Bohman 1996, 89). In this way, what is crucial is not the agreement as such, but how citizens reason together within a common public sphere. The democratic principle in this form expresses an ideal of citizenship rather than a standard of liberal legitimacy .

The internal complexity of democratic discourse does not overcome the problem of the application of the democratic principle to contemporary social circumstances. As Habermas puts it, "unavoidable social complexity makes it necessary to apply the criteria of democracy in a differentiated way" (Habermas 1996, 486). Such complexity restricts the application of fully democratic justification for a number of reasons: first, it is not possible for the sovereign will of the people by their democratic decision-making powers to constitute the whole of society; and, second, a society formed by merely associative and communicative means of coordination and cooperation is no longer possible. This objection to radical democracy is thus directed to those theories that do not figure out how such principles can be institutionally mediated given current social facts. Indeed, institutional mediation can overcome deficits in communicative self-organization, in so far as they compensate for "the cognitive indeterminacy, motivational insecurity, and the limiting coordinating power of moral norms and informal norms of action in general" (Habermas 1996, 323).

This approach to law has important consequences for a critical theory, since it changes how we appeal to democratic norms in criticizing current institutions: it is not clear exactly what the difference is between a radical and a liberal democracy, since some of the limitations on participation are due to the constraints of social facts and not to power asymmetries. By insisting upon popular sovereignty as the outcome of the generation of "communicative power" in the public sphere, Habermas tries to save the substance of radical democracy. The unresolved difficulty is that in a complex society, as Habermas asserts, "public opinion does not rule" but rather points administrative power in particular directions; or, as he puts it, it does not "steer" but "countersteers" institutional complexity (Habermas 1996, chapter 8). That is, members of the public do not control social processes; qua members of a public, they may exercise influence through particular institutionalized mechanisms and channels of communication.

The open question for current Critical Theory (although not all critical theories) is then whether or not "real democracy" is still the goal of social criticism given these putatively "unavoidable" facts about the structure of modern society. Even given the limits of social complexity, there is still room for judgments of greater or lesser democracy, particularly with regard to the democratic value of freedom from domination. For example, a critical theory of globalization could show that the democratic potential of modern societies is being undermined by neoliberal globalization and denationalization of economic policy. Such a theory sees the solution here to be the achievement of more democracy at the international level. It is also possible that the critical use of democratic concepts may require reconceptualizing the democratic theory that has informed much of Enlightenment criticism in European societies. Here critical theorists are then simply one sort of participant in the ongoing internal work of redefining the democratic ideal, not simply in showing the lack of its full realization.

Either way, radical democracy may no longer be the only means to social transformation, and indeed we may, with Marcuse, think that preserving the truths of the past, such as democratic constitutional achievements, to be as important as imagining a new future. Given the new situation, Critical Theory could now return to empirical social inquiry to discover new potentials for improving democracy, especially in understanding how it may increase the scope and effectiveness of public deliberation. In these various roles, critical theorists are participants in the democratic public sphere. One of the main continuing legacies of Critical Theory has been to see that democracy is "the unfinished project of modernity" (Habermas 1986, xi) and its further realization and transformation a genuine goal even in complex and globalizing societies. To do so would entail a different, perhaps more reflexive notion of critical social inquiry, in which democracy is not only the object of study but is itself understood as a form of social inquiry. Critical Theory would then have to change its conception of what makes it practical and democratic.

In the next two sections, I will discuss two aspects of this transformed conception of Critical Theory. First, I turn to the role of social theory in this more pragmatic account of critical social inquiry. Contrary to its origins in Marxian theoretical realism, I argue for methodological and theoretical pluralism as the best form of practical social science aimed at human emancipation. Second, I illustrate this conception in developing the outlines of a critical theory of globalization, in which greater democracy and nondomination are its goals. This theory also has a normative side, which is inquiry into democracy itself outside of its familiar social container of the nation state. In this sense, it attempts not just to show constraints but also open possibilities. Critical Theorists have failed not only to take up the challenge of such new social circumstances but also thereby to reformulate democratic ideals in novel ways. I shift first to the understanding of the philosophy of social science that would help in this rearticulation of Critical Theory as critical social inquiry as a practical and normative enterprise.

Such a practical account of social inquiry has much in common with pragmatism, old and new (Bohman 1999a, 1999b). As with pragmatism, Critical Theory came gradually to reject the demand for a scientific or objective basis of criticism grounded in a grand theory. This demand proved hard to square with the demands of social criticism directed to particular audiences at particular times with their own distinct demands and needs for liberation or emancipation. The first step was to move the critical social scientist away from seeking a single unifying theory to employing many theories in diverse historical situations. Rather, it is better to start with agents' own pretheoretical knowledge and self-understandings. The issue for critical social inquiry is not only how to relate pretheoretical and theoretical knowledge of the social world, but also how to move among different irreducible perspectives. The second step is to show that such a practical alternative not only provides the basis for robust social criticism, but also that it better accounts for and makes use of the pluralism inherent in various methods and theories of social inquiry. While it is far from clear that all critical theorists understand themselves in this way, most agree that only a practical form of critical inquiry can meet the epistemic and normative challenges of social criticism and thus provide an adequate philosophical basis fulfilling the goals of a critical theory.

The philosophical problem that emerges in critical social inquiry is to identify precisely those features of its theories, methods, and norms that are sufficient to underwrite social criticism. A closer examination of paradigmatic works across the whole tradition from Marx's Capital (1871) to the Frankfurt School's Studies in Authority and the Family (1939) and Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action (1982) reveals neither some distinctive form of explanation nor a special methodology that provides the necessary and sufficient conditions for such inquiry. Rather, the best such works employ a variety of methods and styles of explanation and are often interdisciplinary in their mode of research. What then gives them their common orientation and makes them all works of critical social science?

There are two common, general answers to the question of what defines these distinctive features of critical social inquiry: one practical and the other theoretical. The latter claims that critical social inquiry ought to employ a distinctive theory that unifies such diverse approaches and explanations. On this view, Critical Theory constitutes a comprehensive social theory that will unify the social sciences and underwrite the superiority of the critic. The first generation of Frankfurt School Critical Theory sought such a theory in vain before dropping claims to social science as central to their program in the late 1940s (Wiggershaus 1994). By contrast, according to the practical approach, theories are distinguished by the form of politics in which they can be embedded and the method of verification that this politics entails. But to claim that critical social science is best unified practically and politically rather than theoretically or epistemically is not to reduce it simply to democratic politics. It becomes rather the mode of inquiry that participants may adopt in their social relations to others. The latter approach has been developed by Habermas and is now favored by Critical Theorists.

Before turning to such a practical interpretation of critical social inquiry, it is first necessary to consider why the theoretical approach was favored for so long and by so many Critical Theorists. First, it has been long held that only a comprehensive social theory could unify critical social science and thus underwrite a "scientific" basis for criticism that goes beyond the limits of lay knowledge. Second, not only must the epistemic basis of criticism be independent of agents' practical knowledge, but it might also be claimed that the correctness of any explanation is independent of its desirable or undesirable political effects on a specific audience. So conceived, social criticism is then a two-stage affair: first, inquirers independently discover the best explanation using the available comprehensive theory; then, second, they persuasively communicate its critical consequences to participants who may have false beliefs about their practices.

Starting with Marx's historical materialism, large-scale macrosociological and historical theories have long been held to be the most appropriate explanatory basis for critical social science. However, one problem is that comprehensiveness does not ensure explanatory power. Indeed, there are many such large-scale theories, each with its own distinctive and exemplary social phenomena that guide an attempt at unification. A second problem is that a close examination of standard critical explanations, such as the theory of ideology, shows that they typically appeal to a variety of different social theories (Bohman 1999b). Habermas's actual employment of critical explanations bears this out. His criticism of modern societies turns on the explanation of the relationship between two very different theoretical terms: a micro-theory of rationality based on communicative coordination and a macro-theory of the systemic integration of modern societies in such mechanisms as the market (Habermas 1987).

Not only does the idea of a comprehensive theory presuppose that there is one preferred mode of critical explanation, it also presupposes that there is one preferred goal of social criticism, a socialist society that fulfills the norm of human emancipation. Only with such a goal in the background does the two-step process of employing historical materialism to establish an epistemically and normatively independent stance make sense. The validity of social criticism does not merely depend on its being accepted or rejected by those to whom it is addressed. Pluralistic inquiry suggests a different norm of correctness: that criticism must be verified by those participating in the practice and that this demand for practical verification is part of the process of inquiry itself.

Despite his ambivalence between theoretical and practical pluralism, Habermas has given good reasons to accept the practical and pluralist approach. Just as in the analysis of modes of inquiry tied to distinct knowledge-constitutive interests, Habermas accepts that various theories and methods each have "a relative legitimacy." Indeed, like Dewey he goes so far as to argue that the logic of social explanation is pluralistic and elides the "apparatus of general theories." In the absence of any such general theories, the most fruitful approach to social scientific knowledge is to bring all the various methods and theories into relation to each other: "Whereas the natural and the cultural or hermeneutic sciences are capable of living in mutually indifferent, albeit more hostile than peaceful coexistence, the social sciences must bear the tension of divergent approaches under one roof ..." (Habermas 1988, 3). In The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas casts critical social theory in a similar pluralistic, yet unifying way. In discussing various accounts of societal modernization, for example, Habermas argues that the main existing theories have their own "particular legitimacy" as developed lines of empirical research, and that Critical Theory takes on the task of critically unifying the various theories and their heterogeneous methods and presuppositions. "Critical Theory does not relate to established lines of research as a competitor; rather, starting from its concept of the rise of modern societies, it attempts to explain the specific limitations and relative rights of those approaches" (Habermas 1987, 375).

This tension between unity and plurality leads in two different directions, one practical and the other theoretical. What might be called the "Kantian" approach proceeds case by case, seeing the way in which these theories run up against their limits in trying to extend beyond the core phenomena of their domain of validity (Bohman 1991, chapter 2). This approach is not theoretical in orientation, but more akin to "social science with a practical intent" to use Habermas's older vocabulary (Habermas 1971). The "Kantian" answer is given sharpest formulation by Weber in his philosophy of social science. While recognizing the hybrid nature of social science as causal and interpretive, he sought explanations of particular phenomena that united both dimensions. For example, in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism he brought the macroanalysis of institutional structures together with the micro-analysis of economic rationality and religious belief (Weber 1958). According to this contrasting approach, "the relative rights and specific limitations" of each theory and method are recognized by assigning them to their own particular (and hence limited) empirical domain rather than establishing these judgments of scope and domain through a more comprehensive theory that encompasses all others.

The second approach may be termed "Hegelian." Here theorists seek to unify social scientific knowledge in broad comprehensive theories that produce a general history of modern societies. But general theories provide "general interpretive frameworks" on which it is possible to construct "critical histories of the present" (McCarthy in Hoy and McCarthy 1994, 229-230). Even this account of a comprehensive theory hardly eliminates competing histories that bring together different theories and methods. Rather than aiming at a single best history, "Hegelian" theories of this sort are seen as practical proposals whose critical purchase is seen in offering a comprehensive interpretation of the present situation. They do not rely on the criteria of a theory of rationality often appealed to in the Kantian approach, but still seem to justify particular moral claims, such as claims concerning justice and injustice.

Habermas wants to straddle the divide between the Kantian and the Hegelian approaches in his social theory of modernity. Why not see Habermas's theory of rationality as providing both a theoretical and practical basis for Critical Theory? Certainly, this is how Habermas sees the purpose of such a theory (Habermas 1984, chapter 1). Yet even if this theory of rationality has to be understood in this way, it would still have to avoid what Rorty calls "the ambiguity of rationality," between its statuses as "a cognitive faculty and a moral virtue." For this reason, Rorty keeps them distinct. "The epistemological notion of rationality concerns our relation to something nonhuman, whereas the moral notion concerns our relations to our fellow human beings" (Rorty 1996, 74). In a way similar to recent arguments in Putnam, Habermas now more strongly distinguishes between claims to truth and the context of justification in which they are made, even as he also wants to reject moral realism.

The problem for the practical conception of critical social inquiry is then to escape the horns of a dilemma: it should be neither purely epistemic and thus overly cognitivist, nor purely moralistic. Neither provides sufficient critical purchase. In the case of the observer, there is too much distance, so much so that it is hard to see how the theory can motivate criticism; in the case of the pure participant perspective, there is too little distance to motivate or justify any criticism at all. It is also the same general theoretical and methodological dilemma that characterizes the debates between naturalist and anti-naturalist approaches. While the former sees terms such as rationality as explanans to explain away such phenomena as norms, the latter argues that normative terms are not so reducible and thus figure in both explanans and explanandum. The best practical account here reconciles Rorty's ambiguity by putting the epistemological component in the social world, in our various cognitive perspectives towards it that include the normative perspectives of others. The ambiguity is then the practical problem of adopting different points of view, something that reflective participants in self-critical practices must already be able to do by virtue of their competence.

This shift to "perspective taking" is already implicit in the reflexivity of practical forms of Critical Theory. Rather than look for the universal and necessary features of social scientific knowledge, Critical Theory has instead focused on the social relationships between inquirers and other actors in the social sciences. Such relationships can be specified epistemically in terms of the perspective taken by the inquirer on the actors who figure in their explanations or interpretations. Seen in this way, the two dominant and opposed approaches to social science adopt quite different perspectives. On the one hand, naturalism gives priority to the third-person or explanatory perspective; on the other hand, the anti-reductionism of interpretive social science argues for the priority of first- and second-person understanding and so for an essential methodological dualism. Critical Theory since Horkheimer has long attempted to offer an alternative to both views.

Habermas and other Critical Theorists rightly call "technocratic" any social inquiry that only develops optimal problem-solving strategies in light of purely third-person knowledge of the impersonal consequences of all available courses of action. Pragmatists from Mead to Dewey offer similar criticisms (Habermas 1971, 1973; Dewey 1927b). This conception of practical knowledge would model the role of the social scientist in politics on the engineer, who masterfully chooses the optimal solution to a problem of design. For the social scientist qua an ideally rational and informed actor, "the range of permissible solutions is clearly delimited, the relevant probabilities and utilities precisely specified, and even the criteria of rationality to be employed (e.g., maximization of expected utilities) is clearly stated" (Hempel 1965, 481). This technocratic model of the social scientist as detached observer (rather than reflective participant) always needs to be contextualized in the social relationships it constitutes as a form of socially distributed practical knowledge.

By contrast with the engineering model, interpretive social science takes up the first-person perspective in making explicit the meaningfulness of an action or expression. Interpretations as practical knowledge are not based on some general theory (no matter how helpful or explanatory these may be when interpretation is difficult), but reconstruct agent's own reasons, or at least how these reasons might seem to be good ones from a first-person perspective. This leaves an interpreter in a peculiar epistemic predicament: what started as the enterprise of seeing things from others' points of view can at best provide the best interpretation for us of how things are for them. As a matter of interpretive responsibility, there is no getting around the fact that ethnography or history is our attempt "to see another form of life in the categories of our own" (Geertz 1971, 16-17; Bohman 1991, 132). The only way out of this problem is to see that there is more than one form of practical knowledge.

Naturalistic and hermeneutic approaches see the relationship of the subject and object of inquiry as forcing the social scientist to take either the third-person or first-person perspective. However, critical social science necessarily requires complex perspective taking and the coordination of various points of view, minimally that of social scientists with the subjects under study. The "second-person perspective" differs from both third-person observer and the first-person participant perspectives in its specific form of practical knowledge. It employs the know-how of a participant in dialogue or communication (Bohman 2000). This perspective provides the alternative to opposing perspectives especially when our first-person knowledge or third-person theories get it wrong. When faced with interpreting others' behavior we quickly run into the limits of first-person knowledge simpliciter. Third-person accounts face the same "gerrymandering problem" as made clear in the private language argument (Brandom 1994, 28ff). Neither the interpreter's nor the observer's perspectives are sufficient to specify these opaque intentional contexts for others. For social scientists as well as participants in practices more generally, the adjudication of such conflicts requires mutual perspective taking, which is its own mode of practical reasoning.

Theories of many different sorts locate interpretation as a practice, that is, in acts and processes of ongoing communication. Communication is seen from this perspective as the exercise of a distinctive form of practical rationality. A critical theory of communicative action offers its own distinctive definition of rationality, one that is epistemic, practical, and intersubjective. For Habermas, for example, rationality consists not so much in the possession of particular knowledge, but rather in "how speaking and acting subjects acquire and use knowledge" (Habermas 1984, 11). Any such account is "pragmatic" because it shares a number of distinctive features with other views that see interpreters as competent and knowledgeable agents. Most importantly, a pragmatic approach develops an account of practical knowledge in the "performative attitude," that is, from the point of view of a competent speaker. A theory of rationality can be a reconstruction of the practical knowledge necessary for establishing social relationships. This reconstruction is essential to understanding the commitments of the reflective participant, including the critic.

There are two general arguments for a theory that assumes the irreducibility of such a perspective. The first is that interpreting is not merely describing something. Rather, it establishes commitments and entitlements between the interpreter and the one interpreted. Second, in doing so the interpreter takes up particular normative attitudes. These "normative attitudes" must be those of the interpreted. In interpreting one is not just reporting, but rather expressing and establishing one's attitude toward a claim, such as when the interpreter takes the interpreted to say something to be true, or to perform an act that is appropriate according to social norms. Some such attitudes are essentially two-person attitudes: the interpreter does not just express an attitude in the first-person perspective alone, but rather incurs a commitment or obligation to others by interpreting what others are doing (Brandom 1994, 79). To offer an interpretation that is accepted is to make explicit the operative social norms and thus to establish the normative terms of a social relationship.

The critical attitude shares with the interpretive stance a structure derived from the second-person perspective. Here an agent's beliefs, attitudes, and practices cannot only be interpreted as meaningful or not, but must also be assessed as correct, incorrect, or inconclusive. Nonetheless, the second-person perspective is not yet sufficient for criticism. In order for an act of criticism itself to be assessed as correct or incorrect, it must often resort to tests from the first- and third-person perspectives as well. The reflective participant must take up all stances; she assumes no single normative attitude as proper for all critical inquiry. Only such an "interperspectival" stance is fully dialogical, giving the inquirer and agent equal standing. If indeed all cooperative social activities "involve a moment of inquiry" (Putnam 1994, 174), then they also need a moment of self-reflection on the assumptions of such inquiry itself. It is this type of reflection that calls for a distinctively practical form of critical perspective taking. If critical social inquiry is inquiry into the basis of cooperative practices as such, it takes practical inquiry one reflective step further. The inquirer does not carry out this step alone, but rather with the public whom the inquirer addresses. As in Kuhn's distinction between normal and revolutionary science, second-order critical reflection considers whether or not the framework for cooperation itself needs to be changed, thus whether new terms of cooperation are necessary to solve problems.

Various perspectives for inquiry are appropriate in different critical situations. If it is to identify all the problems with cooperative practices of inquiry, it must be able to occupy and account for a variety of perspectives. Only then will it enable public reflection among free and equal participants. Such problems have emerged for example in the practices of inquiry surrounding the treatment of AIDS. The continued spread of the epidemic and lack of effective treatments brought about a crisis in expert authority, an "existential problematic situation" in Dewey's sense (Dewey 1938, 492). By defining expert activity through its social consequences and by making explicit the terms of social cooperation between researchers and patients, lay participants reshape the practices of gaining medical knowledge and authority (Epstein 1996, Part II). The affected public changed the normative terms of cooperation and inquiry in this area in order that institutions could engage in acceptable first-order problem solving. If expertise is to be brought under democratic control, reflective inquiry into scientific practices and their operative norms is necessary (Bohman 1999a). This public challenge to the norms on which expert authority is based may be generalized to all forms of research in cooperative activity. It suggests the transformation of some of the epistemological problems of the social sciences into the practical question of how to make their forms of inquiry and research open to public testing and public accountability. This demand also means that some sort of "practical verification" of critical social inquiry is necessary.

A practical approach to Critical Theory responds to pluralism in the social sciences in two ways, once again embracing and reconciling both sides of the traditional opposition between epistemic (explanatory) and non-epistemic (interpretive) approaches to normative claims. On the one hand, it affirms the need for general theories, while weakening the strong epistemic claims made for them in underwriting criticism. On the other hand, it situates the critical inquirer in the pragmatic situation of communication, seeing the critic as making a strong claim for the truth or rightness of his critical analysis. This is a presupposition of the critic's discourse, without which it would make no sense to engage in criticism of others.

A good test case for the practical and pluralist conception of Critical Theory based on perspective taking would be to give a more precise account of the role of general theories and social scientific methods in social criticism, including moral theories or theories of norms. Rather than serving a justifying role in criticisms for their transperspectival comprehensiveness, theories are better seen as interpretations that are validated by the extent to which they open up new possibilities of action that are themselves to be verified in democratic inquiry. Not only that, but every such theory is itself formulated from within a particular perspective. General theories are then best seen as practical proposals whose critical purchase is not moral and epistemic independence but practical and public testing according to criteria of interpretive adequacy. This means that it is not the theoretical or interpretive framework that is decisive, but the practical ability in employing such frameworks to cross various perspectives in acts of social criticism. In the above example, it is accomplished in taking the patients' perspectives seriously in altering practices of medical inquiry into AIDS.

Why is this practical dimension decisive for democratizing scientific authority? There seems to be an indefinite number of perspectives from which to formulate possible general histories of the present. Merely to identify a number of different methods and a number of different theories connected with a variety of different purposes and interests leaves the social scientist in a rather hopeless epistemological dilemma. Either the choice among theories, methods, and interests seems utterly arbitrary, or the Critical Theorist has some special epistemic claim to survey the domain and make the proper choice for the right reason. The skeptical horn of the dilemma is embraced by "new pragmatists" like Richard Rorty (Rorty 1991) and Max Weber (1949) alike, who see all such knowledge as purpose-relative. The latter, perhaps Hegelian horn demands objectivist claims for social science generally and for the epistemic superiority of the Critical Theorist in particular--claims that Habermas and other Critical Theorists have been at pains to reject (Weber 1949; Habermas 1973, 38). Is there any way out of the epistemic dilemma of pluralism that would preserve the possibility of criticism without endorsing epistemic superiority?

The way out of this dilemma has already been indicated by a reflexive emphasis on the social context of critical inquiry and the practical character of social knowledge it employs. It addresses the subjects of inquiry as equal reflective participants, as knowledgeable social agents. In this way, the asymmetries of the context of technical control are suspended; this means that critical social inquiry must be judged by a different set of practical consequences, appealing to an increase in the "reflective knowledge" that agents already possess to a greater or lesser degree. As agents in the social world themselves, social scientists participate in the creation of the contexts in which their theories are publicly verified. The goal of critical inquiry is then not to control social processes or even to influence the decisions that agents might make in any determinate sort of way. Instead, its goal is to initiate public processes of self-reflection (Habermas, 1971, 40-41). Such a process of deliberation is not guaranteed success in virtue of some comprehensive theory. Rather, the critic seeks to promote just those conditions of democracy that make it the best available process upon the adequate reflection of all those affected. This would include reflection of the democratic process itself. When understood as solely dependent upon the superiority of theoretical knowledge, the critic has no foothold in the social world and no way to choose among the many competing approaches and methods. The publicity of a process of practical verification entails its own particular standards of critical success or failure that are related to social criticism as an act of interpretation addressed to those who are being criticized. An account of such standards then has to be developed in terms of the sort of abilities and competences that successful critics exhibit in their criticism. Once more this reveals a dimension of pluralism in the social sciences: the pluralism of social perspectives. As addressed to others in a public by a speaker as a reflective participant in a practice, criticism certainly entails the ability to take up the normative attitudes of multiple pragmatic perspectives in the communication in which acts of criticism are embedded.

If the argument of the last section is correct, a pragmatic account is inevitably methodologically, theoretically, and perspectivally pluralistic. Any kind of social scientific method or explanation-producing theory can be potentially critical. There are no specific or definitive social scientific methods of criticism or theories that uniquely justify the critical perspective. One reason for this is that there is no unique critical perspective, nor should there be one for a reflexive theory that provides a social scientific account of acts of social criticism and their conditions of pragmatic success.

The standard ideas of ideology critique exhibit the problems with a solely third-person model of criticism dependent on some idea of the theorists being able to discern the "real interests" of participants (Geuss 1981). Rather than claiming objectivity in a transperspectival sense, most practically oriented Critical Theorists have always insisted that their form of social inquiry takes a "dual perspective" (Habermas 1996, chapter 1; Bohman 1991, chapter 4). This dual perspective has been expressed in many different ways. Critical Theorists have always insisted that critical approaches have dual methods and aims: they are both explanatory and normative at the same time, adequate both as empirical descriptions of the social context and as practical proposals for social change. This dual perspective has been consistently maintained by Critical Theorists in their debates about social scientific knowledge, whether it is with regard to the positivism dispute, universal hermeneutics, or micro- or macro-sociological explanations.

In the dispute about positivist social science, Critical Theorists rejected all forms of reductionism and insisted on the explanatory role of practical reason. In disputes about interpretation, Critical Theorists have insisted that social science not make a forced choice between explanation and understanding. Even if social scientists can only gain epistemic access to social reality through interpretation, they cannot merely repeat what agents know practically in their "explanatory understanding." Here we might think of explanations that create micro- and macro linkages, as between intentional actions pursued by actors for their own purposes and their unintended effects due to interdependencies of various sorts. Such dual perspective explanations and criticism both allow the reflective distance of criticism and the possibility of mediating the epistemic gap between the participants' more internal and the critics' more external point of view. Given the rich diversity of possible explanations and stances, contemporary social science has developed a variety of possible ways to enhance critical perspective taking.

Such a dual perspective provides a more modest conception of objectivity: it is neither transperspectival objectivity nor a theoretical metaperspective, but always operates across the range of possible practical perspectives that knowledgeable and reflective social agents are capable of taking up and employing practically in their social activity. It is achieved in various combinations of available explanations and interpretive stances. With respect to diverse social phenomena at many different levels, critical social inquiry has employed various explanations and explanatory strategies. Marx's historical social theory permitted him to relate functional explanations of the instability of profit-maximizing capitalism to the first-person experiences of workers. In detailed historical analyses, feminist and ethnomethodological studies of the history of science have been able to show the contingency of normative practices (Epstein 1996; Longino 1990). They have also adopted various interpretive stances. Feminists have shown how supposedly neutral or impartial norms have built-in biases that limit their putatively universal character with respect to race, gender, and disability (Mills 1997; Minnow 1990, Young 2002). In all these cases, claims to scientific objectivity or moral neutrality are exposed by showing how they fail to pass the test of public verification by showing how the contours of their experiences do not fit the self-understanding of institutional standards of justice (Mills 1997; Mansbridge 1991). Such criticism requires holding both one's own experience and the normative self-understanding of the tradition or institution together at the same time, in order to expose bias or cognitive dissonance. It uses expressions of vivid first-person experiences to bring about cross-perspectival insights in actors who could not otherwise see the limits of their cognitive and communicative activities.

In these cases, why is it so important to cross perspectives? Here the second-person perspective has a special and self-reflexive status for criticism. Consider the act of crossing from the first-person plural or "we perspective" to the second-person perspective in two reflexive practices: science and democracy. In the case of science the community of experts operates according to the norm of objectivity, the purpose of which is to guide scientific inquiry and justify its claims to communal epistemic authority. The biases inherent in these operative norms have been unmasked in various critical science studies and by many social movements. For Longino, such criticism suggests the need for a better norm of objectivity, "measured against the cognitive needs of a genuinely democratic community" (Longino 1990, 236). This connection can be quite direct, as when empirical studies show that existing forms of participation are highly correlated with high status and income, that lower income and status citizens were often unwilling to participate in a public forum for fear of public humiliation (Verba, et al 1995, Mansbridge 1991, Kelly 2000). Adopting the second-person perspective of those who cannot effectively participate does not simply unmask egalitarian or meritocratic claims about political participation, but rather also suggests why critical inquiry ought to seek new forums and modes of public expression (Young 2002, Bohman 1996).

The practical alternative offers a solution to this problem by taking critical social theory in the direction of a pragmatic reinterpretation of the verification of critical inquiry that turns seemingly intractable epistemic problems into practical ones. The role of critical social science is to supply methods for making explicit just the sort of self-examination necessary for on-going normative regulation of social life. This practical regulation includes the governing norms of critical social science itself. Here the relation of theory to practice is a different one than among the original pragmatists: more than simply clarifying the relation of means and ends for decisions on particular issues, these social sciences demand reflection upon institutionalized practices and their norms of cooperation. Reflective practices cannot remain so without critical social inquiry, and critical social inquiry can only be tested in such practices. One possible epistemic improvement is the transformation of social relations of power and authority into contexts of democratic accountability among political equals (Bohman 1999a; Epstein 1996).

Properly reconstructed, critical social inquiry is the basis for a better understanding of the social sciences as the distinctive form of practical knowledge in modern societies. Their capacity to initiate criticism not only makes them the democratic moment in modern practices of inquiry; that is, the social are democratic to the extent that they are sufficiently reflexive and can initiate discussion of the social basis of inquiry within a variety of institutional contexts. Normative criticism is thus not only based on the moral and cognitive distance created by relating and crossing various perspectives; it also has a practical goal. It seeks to expand each normative perspective in dialogical reflection and in this way make human beings more aware of the circumstances that restrict their freedom and inhibit the full, public use of their practical knowledge. One such salient circumstance is the long-term historical process of globalization. What is a distinctively critical theory of globalization that aims at such a form of practical knowledge? How might such a theory contribute to wishes and struggles of the age, now that such problematic situations are transnational and even global? What normative standards can critics appeal to, if not those immanent in liberalism? While in the next section I will certainly talk about critical theorists, I will also attempt to do critical social inquiry that combines normative and empirical perspectives with the aim of realizing greater and perhaps novel forms of democracy where none presently exist.

While the standard theories of globalization deal with large scale and macrosociological processes, the social fact of globalization is not uniform; differently situated actors experience it differently. This makes it exemplary for pluralist and multiperspectival social inquiry. It is also exemplary in another sense. As a social fact that is not uniform in its consequences, globalization cannot be reconstructed from the internal perspective of any single democratic political community, it requires a certain kind of practically oriented knowledge about the possibilities of realising norms and ideals in praxis and is thus a theory of democratization, of creating a political space where none now exists. We may call this practical theory of praxis a "praxeology" (Linklater 2001, 38). Though the use of the term "praxeology" can be traced back to the work of Ludwig von Mises and even earlier to Alfred Espinas, Linklater's use derives from the way the term is employed in Raymond Aron's work (Aron 2003, 577). The purpose of praxeology, in this sense, is inquiry into the "knowing how" of practical normative knowledge, that is, how it is that norms are ongoingly interpreted, realized, and enacted under particular social and historical circumstances. A critical and praxeological theory of globalization must therefore solve two pressing internal problems: first, how to organize social inquiry within and among transnational institutions more democratically; and, second, it must show the salient differences between national and transnational institutions and public spheres so that the democratic influence over globalization becomes a more tractable problem with feasible solutions.

Current theories of globalization are primarily macro-sociological and focus primarily on globalization as imposing constraints on democratic institutions. While not denying that globalization is such a fact, its explanations can become more critical and practical by also showing how globalizing processes open up new institutional possibilities and new forms of publicity (Bohman 2003). In order to test these possibilities, this theory must make itself a more open and multiperspectival practice; it must become a global critical theory. It is in this context that we can press the questions of the normative adequacy of the democratic ideal that has been inherited from modern liberalism. Indeed, many critical theorists who defend a "cosmopolitan" conception of democracy have a surprisingly standard conception of how democracy is best organized discursively and deliberatively. For this reason, they have not asked the question whether such practices are able to sustain a sufficiently robust and cooperative form of inquiry under the new global circumstances of political interdependence.

In what respect can it be said that this novel sort of practical and critical social science should be concerned with social facts? A social scientific praxeology understands facts in relation to human agency rather than independent of it. Pragmatic social science is concerned not merely with elaborating an ideal in convincing normative arguments, but also with its realizability and its feasibility. In this regard, any political ideal must take into account general social facts if it is to be feasible; but it must also be able to respond to a series of social facts that ground skeptical challenges suggesting that circumstances make such an ideal impossible. With respect to democracy, these facts include, expertise and the division of labor, cultural pluralism and conflict, social complexity and differentiation, and globalization and increasing social interdependence, to name a few. In cases where "facts" challenge the very institutional basis of modern political integration, normative practical inquiry must seek to extend the scope of political possibilities rather than simply accept the facts as fixing the limits of political possibilities once and for all. For this reason, social science is practical to the extent that it is able to show how political ideals that have informed these institutions in question are not only still possible, but also feasible under current conditions or modification of those conditions. As I have been arguing, the ideal in question for pragmatism and recent critical social theory inspired by pragmatism is a robust and deliberative form of self-rule-also a key aspect of Critical Theory's wider historical ideal of human emancipation and freedom from domination.

The issue of realizability has to do with a variety of constraints. On the one hand, democracy requires voluntary constraints on action, such as commitments to basic rights and to constitutional limits on political power. Social facts, on the other hand, are non-voluntary constraints, or within our problematic, constraints that condition the scope of the application of democratic principles. Taken up in a practical social theory oriented to suggesting actions that might realize the ideal of democracy in modern society, social facts no longer operate simply as constraints. For Rawls, "the fact of pluralism" (or the diversity of moral doctrines in modern societies) is just one such permanent feature of modern society that is directly relevant to political order, because its conditions "profoundly affect the requirements of a workable conception of justice" (Rawls 1999, 424).

This is not yet a complete story. Social facts such as pluralism have become "permanent" only to the extent that modern institutions and ideals developed after the Wars of Religion, including constitutional democracy and freedom of expression, promote rather than inhibit their development. This fact of pluralism thus alters how we are to think of the feasibility of a political ideal, but does not touch on its realizability or possibility. Similarly, the "fact of coercion," understood as the fact that any political order created around a single doctrine would require oppressive use of state power, concerns not the realizability or possibility of a particular ideal, but its feasibility as "a stable and unified order," under the conditions of pluralism (Rawls 1999, 225). Thus, for Rawls, regardless of whether they<unclear referent> are considered in terms of possibility or feasibility, they are only considered as constraints -as restricting what is politically possible or what can be brought about by political action and power. In keeping with the nature and scope of entrenched pluralism, not all actors and groups experience the constraints of pluralism in the same way: from the perspective of some groups, pluralism enables their flourishing; for others, it may be an obstacle.

If this were the only role of putative "facts" in Rawls' political theory of modernity, then it would not be a full practical theory in the sense that I am using the term here. Rawls' contribution is that social facts differ in kind, so that some, such as the fact of pluralism, are "permanent" and not merely to be considered in narrow terms of functional stability. Social facts related to stability may indeed constrain feasibility without being limits on the possibility or realizability of an ideal as such; in the case of pluralism, for example, democratic political ideals other than liberalism might be possible. Without locating a necessary connection between its relations to feasibility and possibility, describing a social fact as "permanent" is not entirely accurate. It is better instead to think of such facts as "institutional facts" that are deeply entrenched in some historically contingent, specific social order rather than as universal normative constraints on democratic institutions.

This approach allows us to see the "facts" of modern societies as practical: they are precisely those determinations that are embedded in relatively long-term social processes, whose consequences cannot be reversed in a short period of time-such as a generation- by political action. Practical theories thus have to consider the ways in which such facts become part of a constructive process that might be called "generative entrenchment" (Wimstatt 1974, 67-86). By "entrenchment of social facts," I mean that the relevant democratic institutions promote the very conditions that make the institutional social fact possible in assuming those conditions for their own possibility. When the processes at work in the social fact then begin to outstrip particular institutional feedback mechanisms that maintain it within the institution, then the institution must be transformed if it is to stand in the appropriate relation to the facts that make it feasible and realizable. All institutions, including democratic ones, entrench some social facts in realizing their conditions of possibility.

Consider Habermas' similar use of social facts with respect to institutions. As with Rawls, for Habermas pluralism and the need for coercive political power make the constitutional state necessary, so that the democratic process of law making is governed by a system of personal, social, and civil rights. However, Habermas introduces a more fundamental social fact for the possibility and feasibility of democracy: the structural fact of social complexity. Complex societies are "polycentric," with a variety of forms of order, some of which, such as non-intentional market coordination, do not necessarily have to answer to the ideals of democracy. This fact of complexity limits political participation and changes the nature of our understanding of democratic institutions. Indeed, this fact makes it such that the principles of democratic self-rule and the criteria of public agreement cannot be asserted simply as the proper norms for all social and political institutions, and this seems ideally suited to understanding how globalization limits the capacity of democracy to entrench itself. As Habermas puts it, "unavoidable social complexity makes it impossible to apply the criteria [of democratic legitimacy] in an undifferentiated way" (Habermas 1996, 305). This fact makes a certain kind of structure ineluctable; since complexity means that democracy can "no longer control the conditions under which it is realized." In this case, the social fact has become "unavoidable," and certain institutions are necessary for the social integration to which there is "no feasible alternative" (Habermas 2001 122).

While plausible, this claim lacks empirical evidence. Habermas here overestimates the constraining character of this "fact," which does little to restrict a whole range of indirect, institutionally mediated institutional designs. These mediated forms of democracy would in turn affect the conditions that produce social complexity itself and thus stand in a feedback relation to them. The consequences of the "fact" of social complexity is thus not the same across all feasible, self-entrenching institutional realizations of democracy, and some ideals of democracy may rightly encourage the preservation of aspects of complexity, such as the ways in which the epistemic division of labour may promote wider and more collaborative problem solving and deliberation on ends. How might this alternative conception of social facts guide a critical and praxeological theory of globalization?

When seen in light of the requirements of practical social science and the entrenchment of facts and conditions by institutions, constructivists are right to emphasise how agents produce and maintain social realities, even if not under conditions of their own making. In this context an important contribution of pragmatism is precisely its interpretation of the practical status of social facts. Thus, Dewey sees social facts as always related to "problematic situations," even if these are more felt or suffered than fully recognised as such. The way to avoid turning problematic situations into empirical-normative dilemmas is, as Dewey suggests, to see even facts practically: "facts are such in a logical sense only as they serve to delimit a problem in a way that affords indication and test of proposed solutions" (Dewey 1938, 499). They may serve this practical role only if they are seen in interaction with our understanding of the ideals that guide the practices in which such problems emerge, thus where neither fact nor ideal is fixed and neither is given justificatory or theoretical priority.

The debate between Dewey and Lippmann about the public sphere and its role in democracy is precisely praxeological in the sense that I defined the term earlier. In response to Lippmann's insistence on the preeminence of expertise, Dewey criticised "existing political practice" for the reason that it largely ignored "occupational groups and the organized knowledge and purposes that are involved in the existence of such groups, manifests a dependence upon a summation of individuals quantitatively" (Dewey 1927a, 50-51). At the same time, he recognised that existing institutions were obstacles to the emergence of such a form of participatory democracy in an era when "the machine age has enormously expanded, multiplied, intensified, and complicated the scope of indirect consequences" of collective action and where the collectives-affected by actions of such a scope-are so large and diverse "that the resultant public cannot identify and distinguish itself" (Dewey 1927b, 314). Dewey saw the solution in a transformation both of what it is to be a public and of the institutions with which the public interacts. Such interaction will provide the basis for determining how the functions of the new form of political organization will be limited and expanded, the scope of which is "something to be critically and experimentally determined" in democracy as a mode of practical inquiry (Dewey 1927b, 281). The question is not just one of current political feasibility, but also of possibility, given that we want to remain committed in some broad sense to democratic principles of self-rule even if not to the set of possibilities provided by current institutions. How do we identify such fundamentally unsettling facts? I turn next to the discussion of a specific social fact, the "fact of globalization" and interpret it not as a uniform and aggregative process but as a problematic situation that is experienced in different and even contradictory ways at different locations and from a variety of perspectives, and is differently assessed with respect to different normative ideals of democracy. Since this is a relatively recent and unsettled debate, through this example we can see Critical Theory in the making.

For some critical theorists, the relatively "new" fact of globalization permits a direct inference to the need for new and more cosmopolitan forms of democracy and citizenship. Whatever the specific form these assume in future institutions, the usual arguments for political cosmopolitanism are relatively simple despite the fact that the social scientific analyses employed in them are highly complex and empirically differentiated in their factual claims. In discussions of theories of globalization, the fact of global interdependence refers to the unprecedented extent, intensity, and speed of social interactions across borders, encompassing diverse dimensions of human conduct from trade and cultural exchange to migration (Held, et al 1999). The inference from these facts of interdependence is that existing forms of democracy within the nation-state must be transformed and that institutions ought to be established that solve problems that transcend national boundaries (Held 1995, 98-101). Thus, globalization is taken to be a macro-sociological, aggregative fact that constrains the realization of democracy so long as the proper congruence between decision makers and decision takers is lacking. Globalization is thus taken as a constraint on democracy as it is realized in existing liberal representative systems. The Deweyan alternative is to see that facts "have to be determined in their dual function as obstacles and as resources," as problems that also hold out the conditions that make the transformation of the situation possible (Dewey 1938, 399-400). The "mere" fact of the wider scale of interaction is thus inadequate on its own and does not capture what role globalization may play as a problematic situation for the emergence of new democratic possibilities.

A pragmatic interpretation of social facts in this way encourages us to see globalization as Janus-faced, as an obstacle and as a resource for the realization of democratic ideals. This sort of theory sees globalization not as a unitary but rather as a multidimensional process. Even the notion of "complex interdependence" can be misleading insofar as it falsely suggests the telos of an increasingly integrated world or an increasingly homogeneous culture or political community (Keohane 2000, 117). A pragmatic analysis is better served by a concept such as "interconnectedness" as opposed to interdependence to the extent that interdependence suggests convergence and levels the differences in the ways in which globalization is experienced. Rather, it is important here, as in the case of the fact of pluralism, to see that this process can be experienced in different ways by different peoples or political communities, given that it is a multifaceted and multidimensional process producing "differential interconnectedness in different domains" (Held et al 1999, 27). In some domains such as global financial markets, globalization is profoundly uneven and deeply stratified reinforcing hierarchies and distributive inequalities. Inequalities of access to and control over aspects of globalizing processes may reflect older patterns of subordination and order, even while the process produces new ones by excluding some communities from financial markets and by making others more vulnerable to its increased volatility (Hurrell and Woods 1999).

If these descriptions are correct, the fact of globalization is a new sort of social fact whose structure of enablement and constraint is not easily captured at the aggregative level. It is even experienced in contradictory ways looking at its consequences and impacts that differ across various domains and at various locations. Institutions can only manage the problems of globalization in ways that consider the interests of everyone by having mechanisms that ensure that the full range of perspectives is available for inquiry. This requires that international financial institutions extent their forms of inquiry to include issues such as the social disintegration and domination produced by their policies (Rodrik 1994, Woods 2001).

One further question about the fact of globalization must be raised in order to understand the inherent possibilities for democracy in it. Is globalization a "permanent" fact for democracy as Rawls described the fact of pluralism for liberalism in that it is deeply embedded in its possible realizations? As many social theorists have argued, globalization is part of interlocking and long-term social processes beginning in early modernity; as Anthony Giddens put it, "modernity is inherently globalizing" (Giddens 1990, 63). Even if reversing such processes were possible, it is not feasible in any short time span and under the democratic constraints. As with Rawls' fact of pluralism, so long as "globalizing" societies are democratic, we can expect such processes to continue. This is not to say that globalization in its current form is somehow permanent or unalterable if we want to realize democratic ideals. Indeed, just how globalization will continue, and under what legitimate normative constraints, become the proper questions for democratic politics, as citizens and public vigorously interact with those institutions that make globalization a deeply entrenched and temporally stable social fact. However entrenched, the social fact of globalization still remains open to democratic reconstruction, should creative reinterpretation of democracy come about. In the next section, I examine recent debates among Critical Theorists about the significance of the European Union as a model for a genuine transformation of democracy.

The analysis thus far has taken a robust ideal of democracy for granted consisting of self-rule by the public deliberation of free and equal citizens-the ideal of deliberative democracy that informs both pragmatism and Critical Theory (Bohman 2004). Given the uneven and potentially contradictory consequences of globalization, it seems clear that current democratic institutions themselves cannot be responsive to all the dimensions of domination and subordination that are possible considering the scale and intensity of interconnectedness. What are the alternatives? It is not just a matter of exercising an institutional imagination within broadly understood democratic norms and ideals. Informed by democratic ideals of non-domination, the practical knowledge needed to promote the democratising of uneven and hierarchical social relations requires an empirical analysis of current transformations and its embedded possibilities. The democratic ideal of autonomy leads David Held and others to emphasise the emerging structures of international law that produce a kind of binding power of collective decisions. Others look to ways of reforming the structures of representation of current international institutions (Pogge 1997, Habermas 2001). Still others look to the emergence of various institutions in the European Union (EU) to discuss the trend toward international constitutionalism or supranational deliberation.

According to the sort of plurality of perspectives endorsed by a pragmatist philosophy of social science, a historical account of the emergence of single and multiple institutions would be helpful. In Gerald Ruggie's masterful analysis of the development of a global order beyond the nation-state, he shows that the modern sovereign state and the social empowerment of citizens emerged within the same epistemic era as the single point perspective in painting, cartography, or optics. "The concept of sovereignty then represented merely the doctrinal counterpart of the application of single point perspective to the organization of political space" (Ruggie, 2000, 186). Unbundling sovereignty would lead to new political possibilities, including the re-articulation of international political space in a new way that cannot be anticipated in dominant theories of international relations. Focusing on the shifts in the authority of states and the development of the European Union, Ruggie sees the "EU as the first multiperspectival polity to emerge in the modern era" and thus the emergence of a new political form. The concept of "the multiperspectival form" does seem to offer "a lens through which to view other possible instances of international transformation today" (Ruggie 2000, 196). Such an account also applies to the theory of practical knowledge that might inform reflection on the possibilities of democracy in an era of uneven globalization.

If the political authority that now promotes globalization is to answer to democratic will formation, the institutions in which such public deliberation takes place must seek to become explicitly multiperspectival in Ruggie's sense. The positive conditions for such an extension of current political possibilities already exist in the fact of interdependence-the emergence of greater social interaction among citizens who participate in vibrant interaction across transnational civil society and within emerging global public spheres. In order to develop the framework for such a normative-practical praxeology for emerging multiperspectival institutions, pragmatism and Critical Theory once again suggest themselves: here Dewey's testable claim that it is the interaction of public and institutions that promotes democracy and democratic inquiry. However important giving greater powers to the European Parliament may be, parliamentary politics at best serves a mediating role among transnational and national institutions and is not the sole means to democratisation (Habermas 2001). Given that such institutions cannot easily be scaled up and retain their full democratic character, it is necessary to look to a different institutional level: to the possibility of new forms of social inquiry that may be developing in the problem-solving mechanisms of the European Union.

How might new forms of inquiry emerge that are able to accommodate a greater number of perspectives and also remain democratic? Here we need again to distinguish between first- and second-order forms of deliberation, where the latter develops in order to accommodate an emergent public with new perspectives and interests. Dewey sees the normal, problem-solving functioning of democratic institutions as based on robust interaction between publics and institutions within a set of constrained alternatives. When the institutional alternatives implicitly address a different public than is currently constituted by evolving institutional practice and its consequences, the public may act indirectly and self-referentially by forming a new public with which the institutions must interact. This interaction initiates a process of democratic renewal in which publics organise and are organised by new emerging institutions with a different alternative set of political possibilities. Of course, this is a difficult process: "to form itself the public has to break existing political forms; this is hard to do because these forms are themselves the regular means for instituting political change" (Dewey 1927b, 255). This sort of innovative process describes the emergence of those transnational publics that are indirectly affected by the new sorts of authoritative institutions brought about by managing "deregulation" and globalization. This account of democratic learning and innovation seems not to be limited by the scope of the institutions, even as the potential for domination also increases under current arrangements.

What sort of public sphere could play such a normative role? In differentiated modern societies (that is, societies divided into multiple economic and social spheres such as markets, a state, civil society and so on), one role of the distinctive communication that goes on in the public sphere is to raise topics or express concerns that cut across social spheres: it not only circulates information about the state and the economy, but it also establishes a forum for criticism in which the boundaries of these spheres are crossed, primarily in citizen's demands for mutual accountability. But the other side of this generalization is a requirement for communication that crosses social domains: such a generalization is necessary precisely because the public sphere has become less socially and culturally homogeneous and more internally differentiated than its early modern form (Habermas 1989). Instead of appealing to an assumed common norm of "publicity" or a set of culturally specific practices of communication, a cosmopolitan public sphere is created when at least two culturally rooted public spheres begin to overlap and intersect, as when translations and conferences create a cosmopolitan public sphere in various academic disciplines. Instead of relying on the intrinsic features of the medium to expand communicative interaction, networks that are global in scope become publics only with the development and expansion of transnational civil society. The creation of such a civil society is a slow and difficult process that requires the highly reflexive forms of communication and boundary crossing and accountability typical of developed public spheres. On the basis of their common knowledge of violations of publicity, their members will develop the capacities of public reason to cross and negotiate boundaries and differences between persons, groups, and cultures.

In such boundary-crossing publics, the speed, scale, and intensity of communicative interaction facilitated by networks such as the Internet provides a positive and enabling condition for democratic deliberation and thus creates a potential space for cosmopolitan democracy. Such a development hardly demands that the public sphere be "integrated with media systems of matching scale that occupy the same social space as that over which economic and political decision will have an impact" (Garnham 1995, 265). But if the way to do this is through disaggregated networks (such as the Internet) rather than mass media, then we cannot expect that the global public sphere will no longer exhibit features of the form of the national public sphere. Rather, it will be a public of publics, of disaggregated networks embedded in a variety of institutions rather than an assumed unified national public sphere.

The emergence of transnational public spheres is informative for the practical goals of a critical theory of globalization. Once we examine the potential ways in which the Internet can expand the features of communicative interaction, whether or not the Internet is a public sphere is a practical question of possibility rather than a theoretical question about the fact of the matter. It depends not only on which institutions shape its framework but also on how participants contest and change these institutions and on how they interpret the Internet as a public space. It depends on the mediation of agency, not on technology. With the proliferation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other forms of transnational civil society organization, it is plausible to expect that two different and interacting levels of multiperspectival innovation may emerge: first, new institutions such as the European Union that are more adapted to multiple jurisdictions and levels of governance; and, second, a vibrant transnational civil society that produces public spheres around various institutions with the goal of making their forms of inquiry more transparent, accessible and open to a greater variety of actors and perspectives. This approach does not limit the sources of the democratic impulse to transnational civil society. Rather, the better alternative is to reject both bottom-up and top-down approaches in favour of vigorous interaction between publics and institutions as the ongoing source of democratization and institutional innovation.

According to a pragmatically inspired democratic experimentalism, attempts at democratisation and reform need not wait for publics to emerge; they can be constructed in various practices. Consultative NGOs may generally become too intertwined with institutions and thus do not generatively entrench their own conditions in this way. This practical difficulty is evident in the official civil society organizations of the European Union that fail to promote public deliberation. Without further conceptual and normative clarification, the appeal to various "bottom up" strategies of democratization remains normatively underdeveloped (Dryzek 1996, Jaggar, 2004). Even when informed by democratic aims, this form of politics cannot capture the complex interrelationships of civil society, the state and the market, especially given the background of inequalities and asymmetries that operate in processes of globalization. Apart from powerful corporate actors in civil society, NGOs from economically advantaged regions possess significant resources to influence and shape the formation of civil society in other contexts. A critical theory of such activity asks about the possibility of a strong connection between their powers in civil society with market forces (Silliman 1998).

Besides the spontaneous emergence of publics out of transnational associations, it is also possible to make use of self-consciously constructed publics of relevant stakeholders to act as "mini-publics" that are empowered to deliberate and make decisions (Fung 2003). Here we can include a variety of experiments, from participatory budgets to citizen boards and juries that have a variety of decision-making powers. Properly empowered and self-consciously constructed, mini-publics offer a strategy to get beyond the dilemma of insider consultation and outsider contestation that is a structural feature of civil society activity in currently existing international institutions. Since self-consciously created minipublics seek to include all relevant stakeholders, they do not rely on representation as the mode of communicating interests, or even the inclusion of well-organized actors as a way of achieving effective implementation. Instead they open up a directly deliberative process within the institution that includes as many perspectives as possible and can be repeated when necessary. The minipublic is then an institutionally constructed intermediary, although it could act in such a way as to become an agent for the creation of a larger public with normative powers. In this capacity, minipublics may become open and expandable spaces for democratic experimentation. While many are issue or domain specific, such experiments often become models for democratic governance in dispersed and diverse polities. As Cohen and Rogers put it, the more specific and episodic practices aim at mutual benefits through improved coordination, experimental deliberative practices tied to larger political projects may redistribute power and advantage and in this way secure the conditions of democracy more generally (Cohen and Rogers 2003, 251).

The same point could be made about taking existing democratic institutions as the proper model for democratization. To look only at the constraints of size in relation to a particular form of political community begs the question of whether or not there are alternative linkages between democracy and the public sphere that are not simply scaled up. Such linkages might be more decentralized and polycentric than the national community requires. The issue here is the standard of evaluation, not whether some other public sphere or form of community "is totally or completely democratic, but whether it is adequately democratic given the kind of entity we take it to be" (McCormick 1996, 345). For a nation state to be democratic it requires a certain sort of public sphere sufficient to create a strong public via its connections to parliamentary debate. A transnational and thus polycentric and pluralist community, such as the European Union, requires a different sort of public sphere in order to promote sufficient democratic deliberation. Once a transnational and post-territorial polity rejects the assumption that it must be what Rawls calls "a single cooperative scheme in perpetuity," a more fluid and negotiable order might emerge with plural authority structures along a number of different dimensions rather than a single location for public authority and power. Without a single location of public power, a unified public sphere becomes an impediment to democracy rather than an enabling condition for mass participation in decisions at a single location of authority. The problem for an experimental institutional design of directly deliberative democracy is to create precisely the appropriate feedback relation between disaggregated publics and such a polycentric decision making process. The lesson for a critical theory of globalization is to see the extension of political space and the redistribution of political power not only as a constraint similar to complexity but also as an open field of opportunities for innovative, distributive, and multiperspectival forms of publicity and democracy.

A critical theory of globalization is a practical or praxeologically oriented theory that sees the "fact of globalization" in relation to the goal of realizing the norms of human emancipation and democracy. The central and still open questions for such a practically oriented social science are the following: what available forms of praxis are able to promote the transformations that could lead to new forms of democracy? What sort of practical knowledge is needed to make this possible and how might this knowledge be stabilised in institutionalised forms of democratic inquiry? What are the possibilities and opportunities for democracy at a higher level of aggregation that globalization makes possible? How might the public sphere be realized at the global level? The argument here suggests that such inquiry and institutions must go beyond single perspective understandings of democracy that dominate national political life as well as the various administrative techne that are common in the international sphere. A critical praxeology of realizing norms in multiperspectival institutions might add that it is also a reflexive question of putting such organization in the larger context of a project of human emancipation. Such an interactive account of publics and institutions gives a plausible practical meaning to the extending of the project of democracy to the global level. It also models in its own form of social science the mode of inquiry that this and other publics may employ in creating and assessing the possibilities for realizing democracy. A critical theory of globalization does not only point out the deficits of current practices, but shows the potential for properly organized publics to create new ones. Since the new practices need not be modeled on the old ones, it is not a theory of democracy as such, but of democratization.

In facing the challenges of new social facts, Critical Theory remains a vital philosophical tradition in normative disciplines of social and political philosophy. Furthermore, this vitality is enhanced when it considers a range of democratic claims not discussed here, all of which equally challenge the fundamental frameworks of conceptions of democracy, justice, and their interrelationship: these include the struggles of aboriginal peoples, the disabled, women, and more. One great advantage of the practical account is that it makes it easier to see why there are many different critical theories in different historical contexts, what Marx called the "wishes and struggles of the age." On a practical account, critical inquiry aims at creating the reflective conditions necessary for the practical verification of its inquiry, and these conditions are not confined only to democratic institutions, but wherever publics employ critical social theories and methods as the moment of inquiry of their democratic politics. As new forms of critical theory emerge related to racism, sexism, and colonialism, reflective social agents have transformed these same democratic ideals and practices in the interest of emancipation. In entrenching new social facts, agents transform the ideals themselves as well as their institutional form.

This critical and practical orientation gives rise to three different questions about critical social inquiry. First, does Critical Theory suggest a distinctive form of social inquiry? Second, what sort of knowledge does such inquiry provide in order to provide insight into social circumstances and justify social criticism of current ideals and institutions? Finally, what sort of verification does critical inquiry require? In light of the answers to these questions on the practical, democratic, and multiperspectival interpretation defended here, it is likely that Critical Theory is no longer a unique approach. Methodologically, it becomes more thoroughly pluralistic. Politically, it loses its capital letters as the aims and struggles of the age of globalization become more diverse and not automatically connected by the commitment to any particular holistic social theory. Given its own democratic aims, it would be hard to justify any other interpretation. In a period in which philosophy cooperates with empirical sciences and disciplines, Critical Theory offers an approach to distinctly normative issues that cooperates with the social sciences in a nonreductive way. Its domain is inquiry into the normative dimension of social activity, in particular how actors employ their practical knowledge and normative attitudes from complex perspectives in various sorts of contexts. It also must consider social facts as problematic situations from the point of view of variously situated agents.

This kind of normative practical knowledge is thus reflexive and finds its foothold in those ongoing, self-transforming normative enterprises such as democracy that are similarly reflexive in practice. By discussing democracy in this way, I have also tried to show just how deep the connections are between it and critical social science: critical theories are not democratic theories, but their practical consequences are assessed and verified in democratic practice and solved by inquiry into better democratic practice. Perhaps one of the more pernicious forms of ideology now is embodied in the appeal of the claim that there are no alternatives to present institutions. In this age of diminishing expectations, one important role that remains for the social scientifically informed, and normatively oriented democratic critic is to offer novel alternatives and creative possibilities in place of the defeatist claim that we are at the end of history. That would not only mean the end of inquiry, but also the end of democracy.

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The best way to show how Critical Theory offers a distinctive philosophical approach is to locate it historically in German Idealism and its aftermath. For Marx and his generation, Hegel was the last in the grand tradition of philosophical thought able to give us secure knowledge of humanity and history on its own.

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as a school of thought that derives its ideas from philosophy, sociology and literary criticism, Critical Theory not only is based on (Western) cultural concepts, but can be seen as one itself

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When you look at the field of social psychology and the study of human universals (etics; human behaviors that are common to most or all societies), you will find that some things are seen as a given. Without going into much detail, I quote Moghaddan (1998) in saying that “certain universals in human behavior must exist” (9). He goes on to point out quite a few of them (11f); I will just give 3 of his statements here that I find most relevant to the topic:

„Inequalities in status exist to some degree in all societies, and those who enjoy higher status and are seen to be more credible tend to be particularly effective at persuasion.“ (Moghaddam (1998), 11)

„Awareness of the existence of other people seems to lead to a categorization of the social world into ‘us’ and ‘them’. A consequence of this categorization is often favoritism toward ‘us’. Negative evaluations of groups are often used to legitimize status inequalities, as in ‘they are less intelligent than we, so they deserve to have fewer opportunities and less money’.“ (Moghaddam (1998), 12)

„Social groups are common to all human societies, as is leadership.“ (Moghaddam (1998), 12)
Moghaddam, Fathali M. (1998). Social Psychology. Exploring Universals Across Cultures. New York: Freeman and Company.

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in either a positive way by providing "direct access to opportunities" and "terminating taken-for-granted hierarchies based on control, secrecy, ownership, early access, and geography"  (Dillman (2001), 1346) or negatively, in that "[i]nformation technologies [...] become instrumental in the implementation of fundamental processes of capitalist restructuring"  (Dillman (2001), 1346).

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"The digital world is able to make space and is able to accommodate the multi-faceted nature of the human experience, and this creates the illusion that what has been created and that what is possible in the digital world can be translated into the physical world, into reality." Kidology, min 13:05-13:27.
See also Dillman (2001), p. 1347f about identity-based social movements.

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have always been an integral part of society, but it is claimed they become increasingly important as well as change considerably due to Digital Transformation.
Lupton (2015) points out how power relations nowadays are oftentimes voluntarily reinforced. (see Lupton (2015), 28).

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= social systems that greatly depend "on information technologies to produce and distribute all manner of goods and services" (Dillman (2001), 1344. For different aspects see also p. 1347).

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changes the structure and our perception of society

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- addresses power and social structures
- is somewhat idealistic or even utopian

When you look at power and social structures in society and start thinking and theorising from there, you probably see those structures as man-made and therefore changeable. What I miss here is a broader view. Are those structures really man-made? Or are the influenced or even caused by our biological/genetic setup? If biology/genetics in some way predetermine the way we form social structures, the question of how we can change them might not be the right one to ask, after all?