Andrew Arato
Biographic Data
| ID | 266234 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrew Arato |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrew |
| FAMILY NAME | Arato |
| SIGNATURE | ARATO A |
| AFFILIATIONS | New School |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 78 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 226 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 76 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1971 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Our reply to critics by Andrew Arato and Jean L. Cohen
Habermas on Law and Democracy: Critical Exchanges
The Utopia of Civil Society
The utopia of civil society starts out from the obviously plausible counterthesis according to which the Western liberal democracies, unlike Soviet-type societies, are civil societies, however imperfect. Admittedly, democratic utopias drawing on the resource of solidarity and projecting the vast expansion of communicative processes of will formation can also he, and have often been, totalizing. Revolutionary utopias can use versions of genuine im…
Civil Society and Political Theory
Crisis and Reform in Eastern Europe
Communism in Eastern Europe is in crisis. Its dimensions are social and economic; its manifestation is political. This volume, a collection of essays by leading authorities, describes the symptoms of the crisis, diagnoses the causes of the malady, and offers alternative scenarios for therapy. A unique dimension of this collection is its avoidance of one-dimensional explanations. The contributors approach the subject from very different angles, an…
How we got here? Transition failures, their causes and the populist interest in the constitution
How is it possible, that after the exhilarating start of democratic transitions in the late 1980s and 1990s, today authoritarian–populist options seem to be emerging in many new, as well as old democracies? Why does populism, that in most of its historical varieties has been anti-institutional and anti-procedural, turn to constitution making and constitutional rhetorics as one of its main arenas of contestation? The answers to these questions are…
Response to Melissa Williams
Socialism and populism
Revolution, Anti-Imperialism, and Learning
Forms of Pluralism and Democratic Constitutionalism
Civil society, populism and religion
Democratic legitimacy and forms of constitutional change
The link between revolution and sovereign dictatorship: Reflections on the Russian Constituent Assembly
From Neo-Marxism to Democratic Theory: Essays on the Critical Theory of Soviet-type Societies: Essays on the Critical Theory of Soviet-type Societies
The essays in this volume trace an intellectual odyssey, a search for a genuinely critical theory. The book begins with the question of why the Frankfurt School as well as other neo-Marxist and post-Marxist analysts, both in the West and in dissident circles in the East, failed to produce a critical theory of Soviet socialism or to establish a dynamic relationship with contemporary social movements. As the political struggle in Eastern Europe int…
Civil Society and Political Theory
Part 1 The discourse of civil society: the contemporary revival of civil society conceptual history and theoreticl synthesis theoretical development in the 20th century. Part 2 The discontents of civil society: the normative critique - Hannah Arendt the historicist critique - Carl Schmitt, Reinhart Koselleck and Jurgen Habermas the genealogical critique - Michel Foucault the systems-theoretic critique - Niklas Luhmann. Part 3 The reconstruction o…
From Neo-Marxism to Democratic Theory: Essays on the Critical Theory of Soviet-Type Societies
Israel and Palestine: Thinking the “One State Solution
Framed. America's 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance. By SanfordLevinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Learning from success, learning from failure: South Africa, Hungary, Turkey and Egypt
The article has several theses. First we propose that there is a new method of constitution-making today, the two-stage, post-sovereign one perfected in South Africa. Second, we admit the path-dependent nature, and difficult pre-conditions, of this method. Third, we maintain that even when the full method is unlikely in a given context, its legitimating principles nevertheless can play a role through international dissemination. We explore that p…
Political Theology and Populism
Why should we engage in the secularization and disenchantment of political concepts, the preservation or the re-establishment of their secular and rational character? This paper will first argue, using the example of Carl Schmitt, that positive reliance on political theology not only can have a profoundly authoritarian meaning, but is helpful in disguising and misrepresenting that meaning. Second, I will try to show, that taking this topos seriou…
Conventions, Constituent Assemblies, and Round Tables: Models, principles and elements of democratic constitution-making
The article presents the Round Table form, elsewhere post-sovereign multi-stage constitution making as an independent democratic type superior to the alternatives. It locates the form along with Convention and Constituent Assembly both in a comprehensive typology based on models of regime transformation, as well as historically. After making a set of normative arguments comparing the three forms, focusing on the issue legitimation, I make a case …
Lefort, the Philosopher of 1989
Multi‐Track Constitutionalism Beyond Carl Schmitt
Two great models of constitution making are in competition today, the populist-democratic one revived in the Andean republics of Latin America, and the post (organ) sovereign paradigm developed from Spain in the 1970s via Central Europe in 89 and after, and perfected in South Africa in the 1990s. The former, with an elective affinity for dictatorship so obviously precarious for constitutional democracy, falls well within Carl Schmitt’s institutio…
What I Have Learned: Concluding Remarks
The short presentation responded to participants in a workshop on my work, stressing two points: the normative foundations for post sovereign multi-stage constitution making, and its result in South Africa, namely a multi-leveled form of constitutionalism protected against easy abrogation of rights
Democratic constitution-making and unfreezing the Turkish process
This short article will seek to explore the causes, and possible solutions, of what seems to be the current freezing of the Turkish constitution-making process that has had some dramatic successes in the 1990s and early 2000s. I make the strong claim that democratic legitimacy or constituent authority should not be reduced either to any mode of power, even popular power, or to mere legality. It is these types of reduction that I find especially t…
Political Theology and Populism
Why should we engage in the secularization and disenchantment of political concepts, the preservation or the re-establishment of their secular and rational character? This paper will first argue, using the example of Carl Schmitt, that positive reliance on political theology not only can have a profoundly authoritarian meaning, but is helpful in disguising and misrepresenting that meaning. Second, I will try to show, that taking this topos seriou…
Civil society, populism and religion
Civil Society Against the State: Poland 1980-81
The categories of civil society are not extraneous to the Polish events. The participants themselves and their Western collaborators have characterized their struggle in terms of society against the state. "The state has not been able to successfully dissolve civil society," writes Smolar in the preface to a volume of writings by Polish dissidents. "The texts ... are manifestations of the existence and vitality of civil society in a country ruled…
Representação, soberania popular, e accountability
São examinados cinco conjuntos normativos de demandas que têm a chance de reduzir o imenso hiato entre os representados e os representantes nas democracias modernas. Como um desses conjuntos, a accountability é mais facilmente entendida em relação aos outros
The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power: A Sociological Study of the Role of the Intelligentsia in Socialism
The Bush Tribunals and the Specter of Dictatorship
The Return to Civil Society
The Occupation of Iraq and the Difficult Transition from Dictatorship
Sistani v. Bush: Constitutional Politics in Iraq
The Constitutional Reform Proposal of the Turkish Government: The Return of Majority Imposition
The Neo-Idealist Defense of Subjectivity
Any history of Marxism from Marx to the Frankfurt School which proceeds through the Second International to Lukács, Gramsci, and Korsch to more recent Marxist reformulations will not make much sense since no continuity will be possible to establish. In fact, to understand any version of Marxism after Lukács and the 1920s (excluding, of course, the vulgar varieties of many “orthodox” renditions) it is crucial to critically examine the neo-Kantian …
Conventions, Constituent Assemblies, and Round Tables: Models, principles and elements of democratic constitution-making
The article presents the Round Table form, elsewhere post-sovereign multi-stage constitution making as an independent democratic type superior to the alternatives. It locates the form along with Convention and Constituent Assembly both in a comprehensive typology based on models of regime transformation, as well as historically. After making a set of normative arguments comparing the three forms, focusing on the issue legitimation, I make a case …
Interim Imposition
[MacArthur] said that he had issued no orders or directives, and that he had limited himself merely to suggestions.... He stated that it was his belief, that it was his conviction, that a constitution, no matter how good, no matter how well written, forced upon the Japanese by bayonet would last just as long as bayonets were present, and he was certain that the moment force was withdrawn and the Japanese were left to their own devices they would …
Empire vs. Civil Society: Poland 1981-82
Support for the Polish democratic movement should have been easy for all those supposedly opposed to the totalitarian status quo in Eastern Europe. All Marxists should have been convinced by the overwhelming working class character of the Polish opposition (one of the rare proletarian revolutions in history). Remnants of the libertarian New Left should have seen its stress on an alternative public sphere and on direct democracy as one of the few …
Socialism and populism
Lefort, the Philosopher of 1989
Multi‐Track Constitutionalism Beyond Carl Schmitt
Two great models of constitution making are in competition today, the populist-democratic one revived in the Andean republics of Latin America, and the post (organ) sovereign paradigm developed from Spain in the 1970s via Central Europe in 89 and after, and perfected in South Africa in the 1990s. The former, with an elective affinity for dictatorship so obviously precarious for constitutional democracy, falls well within Carl Schmitt’s institutio…
Democratic constitution-making and unfreezing the Turkish process
This short article will seek to explore the causes, and possible solutions, of what seems to be the current freezing of the Turkish constitution-making process that has had some dramatic successes in the 1990s and early 2000s. I make the strong claim that democratic legitimacy or constituent authority should not be reduced either to any mode of power, even popular power, or to mere legality. It is these types of reduction that I find especially t…
Redeeming the Still Redeemable: Post Sovereign Constitution Making
Banishing the Sovereign? Internal and External Sovereignty in Arendt
According to Hannah Arendt “the great and, in the long run, perhaps the greatest American innovation in politics as such was the consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politic of the republic, the insight that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny are the same.” It is very clear that Arendt considers the American abolition of sovereignty to pertain to internal affairs only; first, because she explicitly says “within t…
Understanding Bureaucratic Centralism
The failure of classical Marxist social theory is nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in the face of the bureaucratic centralist societies that use Marxism as their “science” of legitimation. The project of a critical social theory demands the immanent critique of all Marxist and neo-Marxist attempts to theorize this new social formation, but this is as yet an unfulfilled task. For now, only some hypotheses are possible regarding the failure o…
Lukacs' Theory of Reification
The theory of reification is an indispensable part of the dialectical theory of society. The first large scale formulation of this theory was presented by Georg Lukács in 1923, in History and Class Consciousness. The concept of reification [Verdinglichung] came to Lukács through several channels. He presents us with a Marxian definition. Reification [res: thing: das Ding] refers to the phenomenon (and the resulting phenomena) of a “definite socia…
Democratic legitimacy and forms of constitutional change
Minima Politica after September 11
Dictatorship Before and After Totalitarianism
LET us reopen that remarkable book, The Origins of Totalitarianism . After all the commentaries and Arendt's subsequent works, can we still read it with a fresh eye? As we try, can we get away from the concerns of a dead Sovietology and a very much alive Holocaust cottage industry? Can we, as she always tried, refocus on the present and its politics? The angle of vision I selected is that of modern dictatorship. I do not know if we are destined t…
Lukacs' Path to Marxism (1910 - 1923)
In 1909, in a short essay on the great Hungarian poet Endre Ady, the young Lukács wrote that Ady was "the poet of the Hungarian revolutionaries without a revolution. Ady's audience is pathetically grotesque. It consists of men who feel there is no help other than revolution. Who see that everything that is was never new or good ... but bad, which cannot be corrected, which must be destroyed to give place to new possibilities. There would be need …
Georges Lukacs. George Lichtheim
Lukacs' Theory of Reification
The theory of reification is an indispensable part of the dialectical theory of society. The first large scale formulation of this theory was presented by Georg Lukács in 1923, in History and Class Consciousness. The concept of reification [Verdinglichung] came to Lukács through several channels. He presents us with a Marxian definition. Reification [res: thing: das Ding] refers to the phenomenon (and the resulting phenomena) of a “definite socia…
The Second International: A Reexamination
The history of the Marxism of the Second International is not over and done with. Theirs is the classical version of the theory: no politically significant Marxism, such as Bolshevism, Trotskyism or Maoism, departed from them on the most general questions of philosophy and social theory. Only an investigation that is both social and intellectual history could fully show how and why a version of the theory that hardly exhausts, and in part falsifi…
The Neo-Idealist Defense of Subjectivity
Any history of Marxism from Marx to the Frankfurt School which proceeds through the Second International to Lukács, Gramsci, and Korsch to more recent Marxist reformulations will not make much sense since no continuity will be possible to establish. In fact, to understand any version of Marxism after Lukács and the 1920s (excluding, of course, the vulgar varieties of many “orthodox” renditions) it is crucial to critically examine the neo-Kantian …
Introduction: Issues in the Marxian Theory of History
Rethinking Western Marxism: Reply to Martin Jay
The most painful aspect of having to reply to Jay is that it requires rereading a book which, the second time around, turns out to be even worse than originally suspected. Yet, a more extensive elaboration of its themes is warranted, not by any significant reevaluation of the book's quality, but by the need to provide more substantial counterarguments to patently untenable claims and to indicate the general characteristics of an alternative view …
Introduction: The Antinomies of the Neo-Marxian Theory of Culture
(1977). Introduction: The Antinomies of the Neo-Marxian Theory of Culture. International Journal of Sociology: Vol. 7, Walter Benjamin and the Sociology of Art, pp. 3-24
The Essential Frankfurt School Reader
The Frankfurt School of philosophers, aestheticians, sociologists, and political scientists (including Theodore W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse) represents one of the most interesting and unique intellectual events of the twentieth century. Editors Arato and Gebhardt offer major introductions to the three sections that comprise the Reader, in which they seek to place to historical development of the Sc…
Understanding Bureaucratic Centralism
The failure of classical Marxist social theory is nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in the face of the bureaucratic centralist societies that use Marxism as their “science” of legitimation. The project of a critical social theory demands the immanent critique of all Marxist and neo-Marxist attempts to theorize this new social formation, but this is as yet an unfulfilled task. For now, only some hypotheses are possible regarding the failure o…
The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power: A Sociological Study of the Role of the Intelligentsia in Socialism
The Limits of the Leninist Opposition: Reply to David Bathrick
Rudolf Bahro is free. Hopefully he will not be buried by uncritical praise. While his courage and integrity are undeniable, his theoretical synthesis, applauded in the West by Marxists of various stripes, belongs to that set of works from Trotsky to Hegediis which criticize the social systems of Eastern Europe only in terms that remain deeply embedded in the presuppositions of these systems. Their work belongs to the Eastern European past, even i…
Empire vs. Civil Society: Poland 1981-82
Support for the Polish democratic movement should have been easy for all those supposedly opposed to the totalitarian status quo in Eastern Europe. All Marxists should have been convinced by the overwhelming working class character of the Polish opposition (one of the rare proletarian revolutions in history). Remnants of the libertarian New Left should have seen its stress on an alternative public sphere and on direct democracy as one of the few …
Civil Society Against the State: Poland 1980-81
The categories of civil society are not extraneous to the Polish events. The participants themselves and their Western collaborators have characterized their struggle in terms of society against the state. "The state has not been able to successfully dissolve civil society," writes Smolar in the preface to a volume of writings by Polish dissidents. "The texts ... are manifestations of the existence and vitality of civil society in a country ruled…
Arato-Breines and Lowy on Lukacs
Toward a Sociological Understanding of the Revolutionary Intelligentsia: The Case of the Young Lukacs
The Peace Movement and Western European Sovereignty
The Western European peace movements represent an important new phase of the struggle for social and political democratization. As in the case of the ecology movement and movements for urban autonomy, here too the public thematization of issues traditionally left to the administrative arbitrariness of the state, corporate boards and-or the automatic mechanisms of the market goes hand in hand with the self-constitution of democratic forms of assoc…
Reply to Our Non-Critics
This reply ought to have been superfluous. We would have been simply grateful that our piece, “The Peace Movement and Western European Sovereignty” (Telos No. 51) has not elicited the kind of criticism and use of language (reminiscent of Marx and Lenin at their worst) to which Bookchin (Telos No. 52) subjected Whitebook's careful, balanced, scholarly articles: “The Concept of Nature in Habermas” (Telos No. 40), and “Saving the Subject” Telos No. …
The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power: A Sociological Study of the Role of the Intelligentsia in Socialism
On Cultural Freedom: An Exploration of Public Life in Poland and America
Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, On Cultural Freedom. An Exploration of Public Life in Poland and America. Chicago. The University of Chicago Press. 173 pages
The Budapest School and actually existing socialism
Civil Society And Social Theory
Civil society and political theory
From Neo-Marxism to Democratic Theory: Essays on the Critical Theory of Soviet-type Societies
The essays in this volume trace an intellectual odyssey, a search for a genuinely critical theory. The book begins with the question of why the Frankfurt School as well as other neo-Marxist and post-Marxist analysts, both in the West and in dissident circles in the East, failed to produce a critical theory of Soviet socialism or to establish a dynamic relationship with contemporary social movements. As the political struggle in Eastern Europe int…
The Return to Civil Society
Political science (64 works) · Law (57 works) · Sociology (54 works) · Politics (47 works) · Law (42 works) · Philosophy (35 works) · Philosophy (23 works) · Citation (21 works) · Computer Science (21 works) · Epistemology (20 works)