From a Theory of Justice to a Critique of Capitalism: How Nancy Fraser Revitalizes Social Theory

Abstract

In her text, Alice Le Goff discusses the main contribution of Nancy Fraser’s perspective, emphasizing the avenues of reflection that she opened up and that induce interesting extensions. She defines the core of the problematic that structures Fraser’s work and highlights its most fruitful aspects. She does not describe in a chronological way the evolution of Fraser’s work from the 1980s to today. She highlights major developments in her research and captures the movement of her thinking from certain angles. While grasping some of the inflection points of Fraser’s work in this way, she brings out the continuity that characterizes a thought like hers, which progresses through gradual deepening. What Fraser has deepened are the answers to some major questions (What is social justice? How can social theory define it in a satisfactory way?). Nancy Fraser owes her academic fame in large part to her contribution to contemporary debates on social justice and recognition. The challenge of her initial theory was to better define the multiple facets of injustice, to show that social justice implies combining recognition and redistribution (Fraser later added a political dimension to her perspective by insisting on representation) and to highlight the difficulties encountered when trying to articulate them. But Alice Le Goff also shows how Nancy Fraser has gradually completed, corrected and redefined her own theoretical frame: Fraser’s theory of justice is now embedded in a critical theory of capitalism. Alice Le Goff first goes back to the initial project of developing a critical theory of recognition and its main contribution. She insists on the way Fraser overcomes some blindspots of the theory of recognition, by focusing on the question of status. She dwells on the norm of parity of participation and its role as the pivot of a multidimensional approach to justice, highlighting how Fraser initiated a fruitful reflection on the plurality of social orders. On such a basis, she returns to a central issue in Fraser’s approach, which is how she aims to overcome the artificial divisions that characterize contemporary social and political theory, by seeking to re-articulate the theory of justice and the theory of power. Finally, she comes back to Fraser’s expansion of her own theory of justice, to the tools she forged to make it capable of taking into account the processes of globalization of the public space: she insists in particular on the integration of the problem of framing and on Fraser’s elaboration of the notion of meta-politics. She concludes this text with an in-depth analysis of Fraser’s project of critique of capitalism, highlighting the central contributions of such a project, by emphasizing the importance of « boundary struggles ». Le Goff shows that Nancy Fraser’s most original contribution lies in the formulation of such a concept, which constitutes a precious tool for social and political theory. Its formulation is the pivot of a fine and non-monolithic understanding of capitalism and of the conflict between the normative logics that runs through this institutionalized social order, but also of an enlarged approach to contemporary forms of social conflictuality. Through such a concept, Fraser contributes to illuminate a major blind spot in normative theories of justice and in the various currents of critical theory, but she also provides social movements and the Left with an indispensable tool for clarifying the grammar they mobilize to formulate demands.

I would like to thank Stephanie O Hara (UMass Dartmouth) for her help in proofreading and rewriting this paper. Thank you for her work on my text and for the discussions we had to make it more clear and accurate. Thank you for the availability and for the warm and friendly support.