Nancy Fraser is Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics in the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science at New School University. Nancy is one of the leading figures of Critical Theory and widely regarded as the most important feminist critic and moral philosopher of the present moment.
After receiving her Ph.D. from the City University of New York, she taught for many years at Northwestern University, before coming to the New School in l995. Co-editor with Andrew Arato of Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, she has published extensively in political philosophy, social theory, “Continental” philosophy, and feminist theory.
Nancy’s recent international appointments include: Spinoza Professor of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam, Jantina Tammes Professor of Gender Studies, University of Groningen, Research Fellowship, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, 2004-2005 and Vice-President and Member, Conseil scientifique, Collège international de philosophie, Paris, 2003-present. She has held Visiting Professorships and Research Fellowships at many institutions, including Harvard University, the University of Paris, the London School of Economics, the University of Stockholm, the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität in Frankfurt, the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Vienna) and the University of Groningen and has delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford University and her work has been the focus of a number of recent academic symposia.
Fraser’s first book, Unruly Practices (1989), proposed a critical theory of the democratic welfare state that went beyond issues of distributive justice, then preoccupying political philosophers in the Anglo-American liberal tradition. Inspired by New Left critiques of bureaucracy and feminist critiques of androcentrism, she defended the expanded understanding of politics found in European thinkers, such as Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas, even as she also found much in their thinking to criticise. Drawing on the insights of the linguistic turn, she proposed a major shift in critical focus: from the standard liberal focus on conflicts over need satisfaction to a radical-democratic focus on the “politics of need interpretation.” Translated into German, Unruly Practices was among the first sustained efforts to integrate post-structuralist and critical-theoretical approaches. A constant throughout Fraser’s career, that effort also distinguished her contribution to Feminist Contentions (1994), which she co-authored with Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, and Drucilla Cornell.
If Unruly Practices reflected the expansive, democratising energies of the “new social movements,” Fraser’s second major book exuded a more sombre mood. Written in the wake of the simultaneous rise of identity politics and neo-liberalism, Justice Interruptus (1997; translated into Spanish, German and Japanese) diagnosed the decoupling of “the politics of recognition” from “the politics of redistribution” and the relative eclipse of the latter by the former. Disputing sectarians who championed one of these paradigms to the exclusion of the other, Fraser proposed a “two-dimensional” theory of justice that integrated the best insights of each.
These works instigated her continuing research into a new theory of social justice enlightened by a grasp of contemporary society, linked to a political strategy capable of uniting the main camps within progressive politics today.
In her contribution to the recent Redistribution or Recognition?, co-authored with Axel Honneth, she proposes that maldistribution and misrecognition are two relatively independent “dimensions of justice,” corresponding to two “folk paradigms” of justice, manifested in the “old,” class-based social justice movements and the “new” social movements of recent decades. This situation requires, according to Fraser, a “dual perspective” analysis, leading to a strategy that combines redistribution and recognition.
All oppressions, she notes, are complex. “Exploited classes” do not suffer only from economic injustice. They also experience a lack of recognition of their social contribution. Likewise, “despised sexualities” do not only experience recognition-related injuries. They also suffer from economic disadvantages, such as obstacles to passing on wealth to their children and job insecurity in some professions. Hence economic class and social status are two analytically distinct, but factually intertwined, forms of injustice, whose remedy is always some combination of redistribution and recognition.
The advantage of taking a dual perspective approach, Fraser argues, is that it prevents the reduction of one to the other, and it makes us alert to the potentially negative unintended side-effects of one-sided remedies for injustice. So, Fraser proposes, what is needed is not a new, super-category that would embrace both misrecognition and maldistribution. We need, instead, a bifocal analysis of every situation, combined with democratic debate and the pragmatic evaluation of the probable effects of every effort at redistribution and recognition. But this does not mean uncritically supporting every struggle that claims to be for redistribution or recognition. By applying what she calls the “norm of participatory parity” - which refers to the material and cultural conditions necessary for every individual to exercise their autonomy - it is possible to deal with the difficult cases where claims for recognition conflict with demands for redistribution, and vice versa.
Nancy Fraser sums up her most recent thinking on her web site as follows:
Until recently, most theorists of justice have tacitly assumed the Westphalian sovereign state as the frame of their inquiry. Today, however, the acceleration of globalization has altered the scale of social interaction. Thus, questions of social justice need to be reframed. Whether the issue is structural adjustment or indigenous land claims, immigration or global warming, unemployment or homosexual marriage, the requirements of justice cannot be ascertained unless we ask: Who precisely are the relevant stakeholders? Which matters are genuinely national, which local, which regional, and which global? Who should decide such questions, and by what decision-making processes? I propose to address such questions by theorizing the relations among three fundamental dimensions of justice: distribution, recognition and representation. I shall argue that questions of distribution and recognition are today inextricably imbricated with questions of representation. I will also argue that under current conditions such questions do not admit of any single wholesale answer. As a result, there is no alternative to a politics of representation, in which the framing of questions of justice becomes a matter for democratic deliberation. Thus, a politics of redistribution and recognition must be joined to a politics of representation, oriented to decision-making processes and governance structures. Put differently, the theory of social justice must become a theory of democratic justice.
Nancy Fraser’s work has contributed to the increased focus now being given to the ethical approach to social issues and responds to concerns of the whole range of social justice constituencies. Her concentration on the interrelations between distinct, and even hostile, approaches to social justice and the unforeseen ramifications of policies across different domains of social justice are of profound interest to both public policy-makers and activists.
Robert van Krieken, Chair of the Department of Sociology at Sydney University said, in relation to Nancy Fraser’s Australian tour:
“A number of staff and graduate students here make extensive use of Nancy’s work, and there’s considerable enthusiasm and excitement at the prospect of her visit. I'm sure there’s also interest in other disciplines: philosophy, politics, gender studies, social work. Certainly we see the kinds of arguments that Nancy’s engaging in as central to the direction we'd like to see Australian sociology, politics and social policy analysis move in.”
Her lectures during her Australian tour will be entitled: “Reframing justice in a globalising world.”
Andy Blunden
28th October 2004
Victorian Peace Network
03-9380 9435
ablunden@mira.net