Philosophy, Contingency and Social Criticism

A distinctive feature of recent thinking about the moral basis of social criticism is its readiness to acknowledge contingency. When a model of ‘reconstituted’ social criticism is proposed, the reconstitution often turns on a renewed, deepened or radicalized commitment to contingency. Conversely, ‘unreconstituted’ models of social criticism are those that aim at or presuppose the transcendence of contingency. A common way of formulating this idea is to say that whereas ‘unreconstituted’ social critics have recourse to ‘metaphysics’, reconstituted social critics think ‘post-metaphysically’. All parties to the debate around the reconstitution of social criticism seem to agree that metaphysically grounded social criticism has had its day. They disagree over the kind of postmetaphysical thinking that social criticism does or should exemplify. The central question of the debate is how, not whether, to integrate contingency into the discourse of philosophy, social theory and criticism.