Stephen K White
Biographic Data
| ID | 253382 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephen K White |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephen K |
| FAMILY NAME | White |
| SIGNATURE | WHITE S K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Virginia Tech |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4817-323X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 65 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 136 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 63 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Imagining democratic insurgency: Enthusiasm, Sublimity, and Finitude
Recent appeals to the aesthetic-affective realm, specifically to sublimity, tend to concentrate on how it can work to disrupt political power. But another, older, tradition of interpretation looks to sublimity not as a generator of dissensus, but rather as a feeling that can bind people together to enact democratic power. Its roots are in eighteenth-century figures as diverse as Kant, Robespierre, and John Adams. But there is a perennial problem …
The Aesthetics of Democratic Power: Sensibility, Normativity, and the Sublime
The Two Faces of Democracy: Decentering Agonism and Deliberation
The democratic imagination is facing significant challenges. These challenges involve not only deep philosophical questions about the core values of democracy but also pressing practical issues related to how we should understand and confront the rise of right-wing authoritarian populism. What should our stance be as defenders of democratic life? The two most prominent efforts to orient us here are the deliberative and agonistic models of democra…
Two Faces of Democracy: Decentering Agonism and Deliberation
Agonism, Democracy, and the Moral Equality of Voice
Agonism emerged three decades ago as an assault on the overemphasis in political theory on justice and consensus. It has now become the norm. But its character and relation to core values of democracy are not as unproblematic today as is often thought, an issue that becomes more pressing as contemporary politics increasingly seem locked into notions of unrelenting conflict between “friends” and “enemies.” This essay traces alternative ontological…
Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory
Response to Kevin Olson’s review of A Democratic Bearing: Admirable Citizens, Uneven Justice, and Critical Theory
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The “Agonistic Turn: Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics in New Contexts
Response to comments
I reply to criticisms of my book, A Democratic Bearing: Admirable Citizens, Uneven Injustice and Critical Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2017) from Simone Chambers, Rainer Forst, and Sharon Krause
A Democratic Bearing: Admirable Citizens, Uneven Injustice, and Critical Theory
In this rich analysis of the changing ideals of citizenship, Stephen K. White offers a path for the renewal of democratic life in the twenty-first century. Looking beyond passive notions of citizenship defined in terms of voting or passport possession, White seeks a more aspirational portrait, both participatory and inclusive, that challenges citizens, especially in the middle class, to confront power structures to achieve greater justice. Using …
Maintaining and enriching a tradition
Deliberation, Accountability, and Legitimacy: A Case Study of Police-Community Forums
Can public deliberation improve the way police treat people of color? The imbalance of power between state officials and historically oppressed communities makes many theorists skeptical of deliberative approaches. Our case study of police-community forums in a mid-sized Southern city suggests that efforts to ensure the legitimacy of such approaches in settings of inequality may be enhanced by intertwining, and even blurring, understanding-orient…
The idea of a democratic ethos’: Contribution to a roundtable on Alessandro Ferrara’s The Democratic Horizon: Hyperpluralism and the renewal of political liberalism
In this article I explore the character and importance of a democratic ethos. Ferrara develops such a concept around the idea of ‘openness’ as part of his broader ideal of seeking to foster exemplary expansions of political identity with the goal of better accommodating the ‘hyperpluralism’ polities face today. I argue that ‘openness’ has several drawbacks that hinder its possible functioning in such a role, contending rather that ‘presumptive ge…
Continental and Analytic lenses in relation to the communicative action paradigm: Reconstructive thoughts
This essay develops the idea that Analytic and Continental orientations to political theory are best comprehended not as mortal enemies, but rather as alternative lenses that, together, allow us to better perceive a broader range of significant aspects of political life than is possible by adhering to only one of these approaches. This claim is fleshed out by an analysis of the communicative action paradigm developed by Jürgen Habermas. If this p…
Does Critical Theory need strong foundations
In this paper I take issue with Rainer Forst's claim that his account of the demand for justification that is at the core of the idea of justice provides our political thinking with a final “fundamentum inconcussum”
A More Democratic Bearing: Reenvisioning the Sensibility and Script of the Middle Class
Rather than think about citizenship in minimal terms (voting, obeying the law), I argue for a more aspirational “bearing” of the public self, one appropriate for the challenges of globalizing, late-modern political life. For left democratic theory this is hardly an abstract issue, given how successful groups like the Tea Party have been in articulating a right-leaning aspirational portrait. What might a counter-portrait look like that was compara…
Reply to Thomassen
No-Saying” in Habermas
Habermas’s paradigm of communicative action is usually taken to be pretty much dominated by consensus, “Yes-saying.” What if this were a radically one-sided perception? We take up this unorthodox position by arguing that “no-saying” in this paradigm is typically overlooked and underemphasized. To demonstrate this, we consider how negativity is figured at the most basic onto-ethical level in communicative action, as well as expressed in civil diso…
Reply to James Miller’s Review of The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen
The result is rather tepid, a hortatory text apparently aimed mainly at people like White himself: thoughtful and compassionate professors of political thought who are otherwise bereft of strong religious or politi cal convictions. Readers who also write for this journal (which White formerly edited) will doubtless be able to savor the many subtleties and nuances of his suggestive text. But whether anyone else will be instructed by White's slende…
Fullness and Dearth: Depth Experience and Democratic Life
How should inquiry into ethical-political life come to terms with “depth experience?” By this, I mean extraordinary experience that breaks into the familiar frames of meaning and reasoning that undergird everyday life, bringing some sort of transformation or significant solidification of basic commitments or identity. Stated in this abstract fashion, my question is likely to seem rather bewildering or uninteresting for the study of politics. But …
The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen
In this book, Stephen K. White contends that Western democracies face novel challenges demanding our reexamination of the role of citizens. White offers an incisive interpretation of our late-modern ethical-political condition and explains how a distinctive "ethos," or spirit, of citizenship might constitute part of an exemplary response. This ethos requires reworking basic figures of the modern political imagination, including our conception of …
Violence, Weak Ontology, and Late-Modernity
This essay responds to the characterization Ted Miller offers (in his December 2008 essay in Political Theory) of the kind of nonfoundationalism I have referred to as “weak ontology,” and that Gianni Vattimo frequently calls “weak thought.” Miller argues that such a position embodies, first, a philosophy of history in which strong ontologies (e.g., religion) are assessed categorically as passé, and, second, are associated essentially with violenc…
Book Symposium on Political Methodologies: The Disorder of Political Inquiry. By Keith Topper
The Self-Understanding of Political Theory Today
Important Information about the Submission of Manuscripts
No-Saying” in Habermas
Habermas’s paradigm of communicative action is usually taken to be pretty much dominated by consensus, “Yes-saying.” What if this were a radically one-sided perception? We take up this unorthodox position by arguing that “no-saying” in this paradigm is typically overlooked and underemphasized. To demonstrate this, we consider how negativity is figured at the most basic onto-ethical level in communicative action, as well as expressed in civil diso…
Foucault's Challenge to Critical Theory
Power, subjectivity, otherness, and modernity are concepts that contemporary political theorists increasingly find to be closely interwoven. In search of an adequate comprehension of the interrelationships among these concepts, I examine the work of Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. I argue that Foucault, although he is provocatively insightful on a number of key points, ultimately provides a less satisfactory account than Habermas. The core p…
I. Poststructuralism and Political Reflection
As the World Turns: Ontology and Politics in Judith Butler
What ought 'foundations' for political thought look like in a postmetaphysical world? I argue for a "weak" ontological model of 'foundations' and employ it in a critical reconstruction of Judith Butler's work. My specific intention is to show that this model provides a better understanding of both the strengths and weaknesses of Butler's writings than does her own notion-shared by many poststructuralists-that one does not need ontology to sustain…
Reason and Authority in Habermas: A Critique of the Critics
Some critics of Jürgen Habermas have charged that his ideas have an affinity with authoritarianism. This criticism rests on a fundamental misinterpretation of Habermas' project for a communicative ethics. Political authoritarianism is deeply incompatible with his conceptions of practical rationality and normative legitimacy. After demonstrating this incompatibility, I propose an explanation for the persistence of misunderstanding on this question…
Violence, Weak Ontology, and Late-Modernity
This essay responds to the characterization Ted Miller offers (in his December 2008 essay in Political Theory) of the kind of nonfoundationalism I have referred to as “weak ontology,” and that Gianni Vattimo frequently calls “weak thought.” Miller argues that such a position embodies, first, a philosophy of history in which strong ontologies (e.g., religion) are assessed categorically as passé, and, second, are associated essentially with violenc…
Deliberation, Accountability, and Legitimacy: A Case Study of Police-Community Forums
Can public deliberation improve the way police treat people of color? The imbalance of power between state officials and historically oppressed communities makes many theorists skeptical of deliberative approaches. Our case study of police-community forums in a mid-sized Southern city suggests that efforts to ensure the legitimacy of such approaches in settings of inequality may be enhanced by intertwining, and even blurring, understanding-orient…
Weak Ontology and Liberal Political Reflection
Determinant les normes critiques d'une evaluation de la reflexion ontologique postmoderne a travers l'analyse de la notion d'ontologie faible, l'A. defend l'idee d'une derive ontologique de la theorie politique contemporaine, telle qu'elle se manifeste dans la pensee liberale de G. Kateb. Examinant le fondement ontologique du liberalisme etabli par Kateb a partir de la notion de receptivite poetique empruntee a Whitman, l'A. etudie les difficulte…
Agonism, Democracy, and the Moral Equality of Voice
Agonism emerged three decades ago as an assault on the overemphasis in political theory on justice and consensus. It has now become the norm. But its character and relation to core values of democracy are not as unproblematic today as is often thought, an issue that becomes more pressing as contemporary politics increasingly seem locked into notions of unrelenting conflict between “friends” and “enemies.” This essay traces alternative ontological…
The “Agonistic Turn: Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics in New Contexts
After Critique: Affirming Subjectivity in Contemporary Political Theory
Is the critique of modern, liberal subjectivity warranted, and, if so, how do we proceed in its aftermath? This article clarifies the ways in which such a critique is valid, as well as the ways in which it both misses its mark and gives us little in the way of resources for thinking further about subjectivity. I argue that thinking in the aftermath must articulate a weak ontological portrait of subjectivity that vivifies the value of both politic…
Preface to the Special Issue “What Is Political Theory?”
Heidegger and the Difficulties of a Postmodern Ethics and Politics
Pluralism, Platitudes, and Paradoxes: Fifty Years of Western Political Thought
Burke on Politics, Aesthetics, and the Dangers of Modernity
Une etude plus approfondie des reflexions esthetico-affectives de Burke est primordiale pour une interpretation adequate de la cause de: 1. sa preoccupation pour le systeme moderne de moralite et de politique et de: 2. son obsession de la revolution
Rationality and the Foundations of Political Philosophy: An Introduction to the Recent Work of Jurgen Habermas
Reply to Thomassen
Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative . Judith Butler The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection . Judith Butler
Books in Review
The Normative Basis of Critical Theory Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas . By David Held Metacritique: The Philosophical Argument of Jürgen Habermas . By Garbis Kortian The Criti…
The Aesthetics of Democratic Power: Sensibility, Normativity, and the Sublime
The idea of a democratic ethos’: Contribution to a roundtable on Alessandro Ferrara’s The Democratic Horizon: Hyperpluralism and the renewal of political liberalism
In this article I explore the character and importance of a democratic ethos. Ferrara develops such a concept around the idea of ‘openness’ as part of his broader ideal of seeking to foster exemplary expansions of political identity with the goal of better accommodating the ‘hyperpluralism’ polities face today. I argue that ‘openness’ has several drawbacks that hinder its possible functioning in such a role, contending rather that ‘presumptive ge…
Fullness and Dearth: Depth Experience and Democratic Life
How should inquiry into ethical-political life come to terms with “depth experience?” By this, I mean extraordinary experience that breaks into the familiar frames of meaning and reasoning that undergird everyday life, bringing some sort of transformation or significant solidification of basic commitments or identity. Stated in this abstract fashion, my question is likely to seem rather bewildering or uninteresting for the study of politics. But …
Book Symposium on Political Methodologies: The Disorder of Political Inquiry. By Keith Topper
Critical responsiveness' and justice
Dans le cadre du colloque de l'Assocation americaine de science politique consacre a W. E. Connolly et son dernier ouvrage intitule «The ethos of pluralization» (1995), qui s'est tenu a San Francisco du 28 aout au 1 e r septembre 1996, l'A. etudie le moment affirmatif du projet de Connolly depuis sa figuration ontologique initiale jusqu'a son engagement ethico-politique. Soulignant la pertinence de l'interpretation positive des critiques nietzsch…
Rationality and the Foundations of Political Philosophy: An Introduction to the Recent Work of Jurgen Habermas
Reason and Authority in Habermas: A Critique of the Critics
Some critics of Jürgen Habermas have charged that his ideas have an affinity with authoritarianism. This criticism rests on a fundamental misinterpretation of Habermas' project for a communicative ethics. Political authoritarianism is deeply incompatible with his conceptions of practical rationality and normative legitimacy. After demonstrating this incompatibility, I propose an explanation for the persistence of misunderstanding on this question…
On the Normative Structure of Action: Gewirth and Habermas
Recently Alan Gewirth has attempted to establish a universally valid foundation for ethics and politics by means of analyzing the “normative structure” of action and what that necessarily entails for any agent. By “normative structure”he means that by virtue of which certain “evaluative and deontic judgments on the part of agents are logically implicit in all action” (pp. 25–26). These judgments, leading finally to a supreme moral principle, are …
The Normative Basis of Critical Theory Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas . By David Held Metacritique: The Philosophical Argument of Jürgen Habermas . By Garbis Kortian The Criti…
Habermas' Communicative Ethics and the Development of Moral Consciousness
The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. One: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Jürgen Habermas , Thomas McCarthy Theorie des Kommunikatives Handeln. Vol. Two: Zur Kritik der functionalistisc…
Foucault's Challenge to Critical Theory
Power, subjectivity, otherness, and modernity are concepts that contemporary political theorists increasingly find to be closely interwoven. In search of an adequate comprehension of the interrelationships among these concepts, I examine the work of Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. I argue that Foucault, although he is provocatively insightful on a number of key points, ultimately provides a less satisfactory account than Habermas. The core p…
Between Modernity and Postmodernity: The political thinking of fred r. dallmayr
Hermeneutics and the Sociology of Knowledge. Susan Hekman
The Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas: Reason, Justice and Modernity
Jürgen Habermas is one of the foremost philosophers and social theorists in the world today. But the complexity and breadth of his thought make him often difficult to understand. In this book, Stephen White offers a clear, accessible, and reliable introduction to Habermas's work, particularly that which he has written since the publication of Knowledge and human interest (produced in English in 1971). During this period, new themes and directions…
Books in Review
Ethics, Politics and History: An interview with jürgen habermas conducted by jean-marc ferry
I. Poststructuralism and Political Reflection
Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment: Nature and the State in a Post-Hegelian Era. Jane Bennett
Domination and Power
The Recent Work of Jurgen Habermas: Reason, Justice and Modernity
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Richard Rorty
Heidegger and the Difficulties of a Postmodern Ethics and Politics
The Recent Work of Jurgen Habermas: Reason, Justice and Modernity
Paths to A Postmodern Ethics and Politics: A Reply to Gibbons
I WOULD LIKE TO THANK Michael Gibbons for his thoughtful response to my essay exploring ways in which Heidegger's work points toward both the problems and prospects of a postmodern ethical-political orientation. Gibbons argues, first, that the complex idea of nearness (Ndhe) in Heidegger is insufficiently articulate to provide ethic of responsibility toward otherness that White endorses (p. 100); and second, that a better route to such ethics eme…
Books in Review
Burke on Politics, Aesthetics, and the Dangers of Modernity
Une etude plus approfondie des reflexions esthetico-affectives de Burke est primordiale pour une interpretation adequate de la cause de: 1. sa preoccupation pour le systeme moderne de moralite et de politique et de: 2. son obsession de la revolution
The Philosophical Politics of the Modern-Postmodern Debate
Desperately Seeking Marie: A Response to Linda M. G. Zerilli
The Cambridge Companion to Habermas
1. Introduction Stephen White 2. The heritage: Habermas and Adorno Romand Coles What remains of Marx? Nancy Love 3. Communicative rationality: philosophical and social scientific implications The idea of communicative rationality Georgia Warnke Critical theory as a research programme John Dryzek 4. Normative democracy Practical discourse and communicatve ethics J. Donald Moon Rechtstheorie Kenneth Baynes Universalism and the situated critic Max P…
Political science (55 works) · Sociology (55 works) · Philosophy (53 works) · Law (50 works) · Philosophy (47 works) · Politics (45 works) · Epistemology (44 works) · Law (44 works) · Critical Theory and Philosophy (24 works) · Democracy (15 works)