A Critical Theory of Social Suffering

Bibliographic Data

ID8078746
AuthorsEmmanuel Renault (0000-0002-9839-2318, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume11
Issue2
Pages221-241
Publication date2010-05-21
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCritical Horizons (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1440-9917 • E-ISSN: 1568-5160
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1558/crit.v11i2.221
OpenAlexW1990647192
LanguageEN
Citations received28
References cited15

This paper begins by defending the twofold relevance, political and theoretical, of the notion of social suffering. Social suffering is a notion politics cannot do without today, as it seems indispensable to describe all the aspects of contemporary injustice. As such, it has been taken up in a number of significant research programmes in different social sciences (sociology, anthropology, social psychology). The notion however poses significant conceptual problems as it challenges disciplinary boundaries traditionally set up to demarcate individual and social phenomena. I argue that philosophy has a role to play in the attempt to integrate the diverging perspectives stemming from the social sciences. I attempt to show that, as it engages with the social sciences to account for the conceptual and normative issues thrown open by the question of social suffering, philosophy in fact retrieves the very idea of critical theory, as a conjugated critique of social reality and of its knowledge. I conclude by showing how the question of social suffering then becomes a useful criterion to distinguish between the different existing approaches in critical theory

Critical theory · Discipline · Epistemology · Injustice · Normative · Philosophy of social science · Political science · Politics · Relevance (law · Social injustice · Social philosophy · Social relation · Social science · Social theory · Sociology · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology · Philosophy · Social Psychology

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