Rainer Forst, Normativity and Power: Analyzing Social Orders of Justification

Author
DOI10.3366/elr.2019.0594
Published date01 September 2019
Date01 September 2019
Pages466-468

Few notions are more intricate and difficult to operationalise than that of “normativity”. In the collection of essays entitled Normativity and Power: Analyzing Social Orders of Justification, the leading philosopher Rainer Forst makes a seminal contribution to the academic debate on the subject by critically hinging normativity on the working logic of rational justificatory practices. In particular, starting from the premise that “human beings [are] justifying beings” (21; emphasis in original), Forst understands normativity as what results from practical reason's ability to bind us through its explanatory, and ultimately convincing, power.

To understand Forst's view, we ought to take a step back and appreciate what recent phenomenological accounts have made clear—namely, that normativity inevitably involves an act of measurement based on some accepted meaningful standards (S Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (2017) 2). In this sense, meaning is the core of normativity: “the making sense relation is the basic normative relation”, as recently observed by David Owens (Shaping the Normative Landscape (2012) 12; emphasis in original).

In Forst's case, the normative standard through which power operates is provided by practical, justifying reasons, of which the book offers a “critique” (24) in the form of a “critique of relations of justification” (17; emphasis in original). The author embarks upon this delicate enterprise in the full spirit of the Frankfurt School, to whom he belongs (he was a student of Jürgen Habermas). The reader should, however, be warned that this is...

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