Abstract

In this paper I discuss the varied facets of political theory that need to be discussed to build a perspective on critical social work for students of a graduate program in social work. Specifically I deal with the coverage of political theories with reference to the nuances that need to be highlighted, the linkages that need to be established and the pedagogical principles that enable the establishment of this connection. Essentially I proposed that this studied lens to critical social work then builds the lens to a range of critical praxis perspectives in social work.

Dr.Samta Pandya Teaches in the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai

Introduction

Political theory analyzes and interprets the foundations of political life and evaluates its principles, concepts and institutions. The history of political thought and analytic and philosophical investigation are its two traditional perspectives (Parksinson and Mansbridge, 2012). It is the study of topics such as politics, liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority. Critical social work is the application of social work from a critical theory perspective, which draws from political theory. Critical social work seeks to address social injustices, as opposed to focusing on individual people’s problems. Critical theories explain social problems as arising from various forms of oppression and injustice in globalised capitalist societies. This theory is like all social work theories, in that it is made up of a polyglot of theories from across the humanities and sciences, borrowing from many different schools of thought, including Marxism, social democracy and anarchism (Fook, 2002a, 2002b). Critical social work draws from political theory distinctly. In this paper, I attempt to highlight this link and discuss the various nuances of political theory applicable to critical social work and some things that need to be kept in view while emphasising this connection.

The Proposed Coverage and Nuances

Traditionally the discussion on political theory commences with Plato and Aristotle. Plato’s lengthy dialog The Republic in which he laid out his political philosophy, becomes the first starting point of discussion. He proposed that citizens should be divided into three categories. One category of people are the rulers who should be philosophers, according to Plato, an idea is based on his Theory of Forms. Aristotle’s Politics as an extension of his Nicomachean Ethics and the political theory is based on his ethics of perfectionism. His main contention is that humans are social animals, and that the polis (Ancient Greek city state) existed to bring about the good life appropriate to such animals. Immanual Kant’s pure and practical reason, categorical imperatives and ideas of perpetual peace serve to be a preamble to further deliberations. This is followed by a discussion on two prominent medieval Christian philosophers – Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine. In synthesizing Christian theology and Peripatetic (Aristotelian) teaching in his Treatise on Law, Aquinas contends that God’s gift of higher reason, manifest in human law by way of the divine virtues, gives way to the assembly of righteous government. St. Augustine’s notion of justice includes what by his day was a well-established definition of justice of “giving every man his due.” Accordingly, justice becomes the crucial distinction between ideal political states (none of which actually exist on earth) and non-ideal political states—the status of every political state on earth. In that respect, the state is a divine gift and an expression of divine mercy, especially if the state is righteously ruled (Copleston, 1993).

Niccolo Machiavelli can then be discussed as the theorist who gave the first systematic analyses of: (1) how consent of a populace is negotiated between and among rulers rather than simply a naturalistic (or theological) given of the structure of society; and, (2) the concept of ideology as a precursor in articulating the epistemological structure of commands and law. Thomas Hobbes and John Locke can then be discussed as renaissance theorists. Thomas Hobbes, generally considered to have first articulated how the concept of a social contract that justifies the actions of rulers (even where contrary to the individual desires of governed citizens), can be reconciled with a conception of sovereignty. John Locke, like Hobbes, described a social contract theory based on citizens’ fundamental rights in the state of nature. He departed from Hobbes in that, based on the assumption of a society in which moral values are independent of governmental authority and widely shared, he argued for a government with power limited to the protection of personal property. This can be followed by a discussion on Baron de Montesquieu’s theory which analyzed protection of the people by a “balance of powers” in the divisions of a state. Another French theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau can then be elaborated upon, who analyzed the social contract as an expression of the general will, and controversially argued in favour of absolute democracy where the people at large would act as sovereign. The discussion needs to be tampered then with the ideas of François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire), the French Enlightenment writer, poet, and philosopher famous for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion and free trade (Copleston, 1994,1995).

Theorists in the Marxian vein could then form a critical arena of discussion. The emphasis should be on Karl Marx’s historicism, the concept of ideology in the sense of (true or false) beliefs that shape and control social actions, the fundamental nature of class as a mechanism of governance and social interaction and his theory of communism. The ideal flow then is towards discussing host of critical and post Marxian theorists including Louis Althusser, V I Lenin, Stalin, Plekhanov, Kautsky, Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse. Louis Althusser’s best known essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation“ is a critical discussion piece which draws on Marx and Gramsci, but also on Freud’s and Lacan’s psychological concepts of the unconscious and mirror-phase respectively, and describes the structures and systems that enable the concept of the self. These structures, for Althusser, are both agents of repression and inevitable: it is impossible to escape ideology and avoid being subjected to it. He suggested a groundbreaking epistemology (theory of knowledge) that rejects the distinction between subject and object. In opposition to empiricism, Althusser claims that Marx’s philosophy, dialectical materialism, counters the theory of knowledge as vision with a theory of knowledge as production. He proposed that the base of society is economics and the superstructure comprises social practices, ideological state apparatuses, and repressive state apparatuses. The assortment of institutions called “Ideological State Apparatuses” (ISAs), include the family, the media, religious organisations, and most importantly in capitalist societies, the education system, as well as the received ideas that they propagate. Ideological state apparatuses, define the self conscious subject. Repressive state apparatuses (RSA) namely the law, institutions and state can be disabling. ISA and RSA constitute the subject and revolution should be aimed at tackling both (Kolakowski, 1978).

Lenin’s revolutionary theory becomes the next aspect of discussion, with the belief in the necessity of a violent overthrow of capitalism through communist revolution, to be followed by a dictatorship of the proletariat as the first stage of moving towards communism, and the need for a vanguard party to lead the proletariat in this effort. This then developed into Marxism–Leninism, a highly influential ideology. Lenin considered “moral questions” to be “an irrelevance”, rejecting the concept of moral absolutism; instead he judged whether an action was justifiable based upon its chances of success for the revolutionary cause. The discussion can be then directed to the ideas of Joseph Stalin who proposed the concept of “Socialism in One Country” as a central tenet of Soviet society, contrary to Leon Trotsky’s view that socialism must be spread through continuous international revolutions. Stalin announced that the society of the Soviet Union consisted of two non-antagonistic classes: workers and kolkhoz peasantry. These corresponded to the two different forms of property over the means of production that existed in the Soviet Union: state property (for the workers) and collective property (for the peasantry). In addition to these, Stalin distinguished the stratum of intelligentsia, a class critical to political theorisation (Kolakowski, 1978).

The Russian revolutionary and Marxist theoretician, Georgi Plekhanov’s famous work ‘The Development of the Monist view of History’ could be the next point of discussion. Plekhanov put a special emphasis on the revolutionary nature of the Marxists’ philosophy. He proposed materialism to be the motor force in history, and specifically, a particular type of materialism—the “economic determinism model of materialism as the specific element that moved history” (Baron, 1963). The works of Italian Marxist theoretician and politician Antonio Gramsci is another critical point of discussion. Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how states use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist societies. The following key ideas substantiate the discussion on political theory: cultural hegemony as a means of maintaining and legitimising the capitalist state; the need for popular workers’ education to encourage development of intellectuals from the working class; an analysis of the modern capitalist state that distinguishes between political society, which dominates directly and coercively, and civil society, where leadership is constituted by means of consent; “Absolute historicism”; a critique of economic determinism that opposes fatalistic interpretations of Marxism; and, a critique of philosophical materialism (Hoare and Smith, 1999; Dylan, 2011). Herbert Marcuse’s ideas could form the next aspect of discussion specifically through his best known works Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964). His famous concept repressive desublimation refers to his argument that postwar mass culture, with its profusion of sexual provocations, serves to reinforce political repression. If people are preoccupied with unauthentic sexual stimulation, their political energy will be “desublimated”; instead of acting constructively to change the world, they remain repressed and uncritical. Marcuse advanced the prewar thinking of critical theory toward a critical account of the “one-dimensional” nature of bourgeois life in Europe and America. He used language more familiar from the critique of Soviet or Nazi regimes to characterize developments in the advanced industrial world; grounding of critical theory in a particular use of psychoanalytic thought (Marcuse, 1969). Three other theorists influenced by Marx deserve discussion space – Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro. Of other forms of governance and state, Bakunin and Proudhon are critical proponents. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is commonly considered the father of modern anarchism, specifically mutualism. After Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Michael Bakunin became the most important political philosopher of anarchism. His specific version of anarchism is called collectivist anarchism (Korsch, 1970; Kolakowski, 1978).

Other important political theorists who can to be discussed to ensure complete coverage of the distinctive nuances are: John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Paine, John Dewey, Henry David Thoreau, Habermas. Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser and Drucilla Cornell. Rawls is best known for A Theory of Justice (1971) and for developments of that theory he has published since. Rawls believes that the utilitarian tradition has dominated modern political philosophy in English-speaking countries because its critics have failed to develop an alternative social and political theory as complete and systematic. Rawls’s aim is to develop such an alternative: a contractarian view of justice, derived from the tradition of Locke, Rousseau, and especially Kant. Rawls carries social contract theory to a “higher order of abstraction” by viewing the principles of justice themselves as the objects of a social contract. What needs to be discussed about Amartya Sen is his ideas which he traces to the Enlightenment, and specifically, the two distinct approaches to ideas about justice, which he calls Transcendental Institutionalism and Realization Focussed Comparison. The former is the attempt to characterise the perfectly just state and usually stems from the hypothetical idea of a social contract – perhaps the main stream approach – starting with Hobbes and culminating in Rawls. But Sen favours the other approach which he says Enlightenment figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft used in actual campaigning – e.g. against slavery and for women’s rights. This approach looks at how actual situations with their impact on people’s lives can be compared in point of justice (Baxi, 2006). What then needs to be deliberated upon is Martha Nussbaum’s work which denies the dominant social contract theory of justice towards the capabilities approach, which suggests a set of basic human entitlements, similar to human rights, as a minimum of what justice requires for all (Nussbaum, 2006). Thomas Paine’s ideas of self governance, John Dewey’s pragmatism taken forward in an ecological sense by Thoreau and Martin Luther King’s ethnic nationalism require serious deliberation thereafter (Smallwood, 2004).

The ideas of deliberative democracy and communicative action by Jurgen Habermas serve as a the next critical discussion. Habermas’s theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason, emancipation, and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests. His major contribution is the development of the concept and theory of communicative reason or communicative rationality, which distinguishes itself from the rationalist tradition, by locating rationality in structures of interpersonal linguistic communication rather than in the structure of the cosmos. Habermas voiced criticism of the process of modernization, which he saw as inflexible direction forced through by economic and administrative rationalization. Habermas outlined how our everyday lives are penetrated by formal systems as parallel to development of the welfare state, corporate capitalism and mass consumption.These reinforcing trends rationalize public life. Disfranchisement of citizens occurs as political parties and interest groups become rationalized and representative democracy replaces participatory one. In consequence, boundaries between public and private, the individual and society, the system and the lifeworld are deteriorating. Democratic public life cannot develop where matters of public importance are not discussed by citizens. An “ideal speech situation“ requires participants to have the same capacities of discourse, social equality and their words are not confused by ideology or other errors. In this version of the consensus theory of truth, Habermas maintains that truth is what would be agreed upon in an ideal speech situation. Habermas has expressed optimism about the possibility of the revival of the public sphere. He discerns a hope for the future where the representative democracy-reliant nation-state is replaced by a deliberative democracy-reliant political organism based on the equal rights and obligations of citizens. In such direct democracy-driven system, the activist public sphere is needed for debates on matters of public importance and as well as the mechanism for that discussion to affect the decision-making process (McCarthy, 1978; Held, 1980; Jay, 1984).

The discussion on western political theorists can then be concluded with discussions on works of Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser and Drucilla Cornell. Benhabib is a democratic theorist who does not believe in the purity of cultures; she thinks of them as formed through dialogues with other cultures. Human cultures are, according to Benhabib, the constant change of imaginary boundaries. They influence each other and sometimes radicalize or conform as a reaction on other cultures. Benhabib argues that in democratic theory it is assumed that every single person should be able to determine their own life. She argues that pluralism, the existence of fundamentally different cultures, is compatible with cosmopolitanism, if three conditions are fulfilled. These conditions are: egalitarian reciprocity, voluntary self-ascription; and freedom of exit and association (Benhabib, 2005). Fraser is a noted feminist thinker concerned with conceptions of justice in the tradition of feminist thinkers like Martha Fineman. She argues that justice is a complex concept which must be understood from the standpoint of three separate yet interrelated dimensions: distribution (of resources), recognition (of the varying contributions of different groups), and representation (linguistic). She believes that as blank slate theory becomes increasingly marginalised by advances in genetics, Marxists should refocus their efforts on the espousal of blind redistribution over more equitable concepts of social justice such as those advocating the need for different groups to make concrete contributions to society (Fraser, 2005). Drucilla Cornell addresses the question of deconstruction and justice through a combination of political and legal theory, feminism and philosophy. Cornell argues that deconstruction necessarily presupposes an ethical relationship to others; deconstruction requires us not only to recognize others as others but also to be open to them and their perspectives. Thus, deconstruction contains an ethical imperative both to question our own beliefs and to understand the situation and views of others. Cornell’s redefinition of deconstruction as a “philosophy of the limit” attempts to make sense of Derrida’s claim that deconstruction is justice by arguing that justice is an unpassable difficulty or paradox for any legal system rather than a transcendent ideal (Balkin, 1994).

Finally the discussion should move to Indian political theorisation with a mention of the Arthashastra, and then moving to Indian renaissance with the economic and political rationalism of Indian social reformers. This could be followed by the ideas of liberal (Gokhale) and extremist thinkers (Tilak), Gandhian thought on non violence relationality and political assertions in the post colonial nationspace through hybridity, liminality, mimicry and interstice (Homi Bhabha’s ideas); ideas of trusteeship, decentralisation and socialism. Other social thinkers and their ideas include radical humanism (M N Roy, Lohia) and finally ideas of social justice of Dr Ambedkar and other proponents of Dalit activism (Ganguly, 2009; Mehta, 2013).

Though not the most exhaustive coverage, the preceding repertoire does provide an idea of the following political theory essentials – state, governance, utopia, dynamics and ideal types. Within the context of critical social work, all these become important deliberation points, as we shall see in the next section.

Establishing Linkages and Building the Idea of Critical Social Work

The positions expressed in the political theorisations, build an idea of critical social work in the following manner. The emphasis of all political theorisations is action towards a desirable utopia for the state and governance processes, something that defines the ‘political existence’ of beings. The following contentions on critical social work get systematically built through the study of the political theorisation repertoire:

• In the epistemology of critical social work, ‘theory’ and ‘politics’, are made to qualify one another. In critical social work politics is seen as a spectacle, an occurrence, something which needs to be looked at and then to understand critically as to what is going on.
• Critical social work, in a political sense, does not validate or prove, rather it is a procedure of discovery or inquiry into processes and norms of state and governance, and most importantly social justice.
• Critical social work practice involves adopting a political perspective and lies in the work of Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School theorists, feminist theorists, among others.
• There is a close identification with structure and structural approaches, making the discipline of social work political, and moving it beyond traditional domains.
• Critical social work is informed profoundly by ontological and epistemological assumptions of political theory, as the emphasis is on the utopia of social justice.
• Most importantly critical social work entails working for social justice in a neoliberal frame: to counter the neoliberal ideology of moving away from emancipator change, towards an increase in governmentality and economics (Healy, 2009; Jones, 2005; Madhu, 2011). The ‘critical’ aspect in critical social work is that to counter neoloberalism, the very tools of political theorisation which talk of governmentality and state, are used, more as arsenals of critical hermeneutics.
• It is this critical philosophical hermeneutics drawing from political theorisations key preoccupations about governance, justice, distribution and accountability, that define the contours of critical social work. It then becomes an art of interpretation or political understanding, rooted in human finitude and human linguisticality” (Gadamer, 1997 p. 248; Gadamer, 1975, Gadamer, 1976).
• A part of the philosophical hermeneutic of critical social work is to study how things in the worldappear and at the same time are covered up.The Greek referred to this study of reality andtruth as Aletheia. It is the dis-closing, uncovering,and dis-covering that which hasbeen concealed. It is both the hiding and therevealing of the things themselves (Moran,2000). Understanding the insinuating natureof domination and oppression is also anexercise in re-discovery. Hannah Arendt, astudent of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers,and a contemporary of Hans-Georg Gadamer,was deeply impacted by the totalitarianismand destruction of the first half of the twentiethcentury. Arendt proposed that philosophyemerges from the discrepancy between theworld of appearances and the medium ofwords that support thinking. She discussedthe problem of totalitarianism, and believedthat it would only be possible in a modernsociety if “…everything – including our senseof reality – is managed” (Moran, 2000, p.299). Arendt believed language becomes apowerful tool in the maintenance of the statusquo through the use of rhetoric. Because itrelies on the art of persuasion, rhetoric is the ability to generate belief without knowledge.It also has the capacity to organize anddiscipline disparate individuals and groups(Fontana, 2005). As such, Arendt was veryconcerned with spin-doctors and speechmanipulated by corporations in order todominate our public space (Tremblay, 2003). Drawing from Arendt, critical social work proposes that although nations pride themselveson their dedication to freedom and democracyfor every individual, in reality we may not beas unshackled as we believe.
• Critical social work talks of political rhetoric and political common sense. It reminds us that the political rhetoric is a part of our social life since the days of Plato and the Sophists. Both political rhetoric and common sense are considered important in the development of a community (Krajewski, 1992), in that community is“…built not by the ‘true’ but by discussionsof the ‘probable,’ and rhetoric deals in the‘probable’ when proof is unavailable orinadequate” (Krajewski, 1992, p. 346).The underlying assumption in political rhetoric is that actors enter into a genuinediscourse, and no one person is meant tocontrol the conversation. To be involved inthis type of genuine dialogue requires both astance of indebtedness and critique, as well astrust and acceptance (Moran, 2000). Thisbecomes problematic when individuals andgroups in positions of authority and powerintroduce hierarchies and euphemisms. To address this, the Aristotelian tradition of rhetoric has to then be re-deployed – where, in a political dialogue, the matter is made accessible to the Other by uncovering and revealing the underlying meaning of the content of the conversation.
• Critical social work draws from political theory, the role of the leader or change maker, like Fook (2002a, 2002b) said that it is a practice where “workers mightsee part of their role as transforming bureaucraticculture by valuing and translatingbetween different discourses” (pp. 147-148).It is the practice of naming different terms orcategories in order to alert people to different perspectives, or un-covering and re-vealing the doublespeak that drives a bureaucratic agenda.
• Further in addition to concentrating on language and systems of oppression, critical social work, akin to political theorisations’ emphasis on praxis is focused on the possibility ofcreating space for action. Theterm action refers to the activities ofhumans that can only be conducted once thedemands of life have been met, such as astable world within which they can achieveboth group identity and solidarity (Dietz,1994). It is the collective condition whereindividuals are dependent on one another inorder to achieve their true existence. Similarto Gadamer’s requirements for having agenuine conversation, action is an activity that comes from without and, as such, can onlyexist in the world with others (Williams,1998). It represents the activities needed tofend off our rising alienation (Dietz, 1994).
• Critical social work is concerned with how modern society limits or restricts the space required to achieve action (Moran, 2000). Like what Hannah Arendt has written, critical social work posits that there is a need for citizenship and participation in democracy, which in Greek is known as polis. “For Arendt the Greek Polis opened a space where humans could freely interact with one another” (Moran, 2000, p. 312). It is the space between people, or the condition that is needed for democracy and human freedom. It is the space where an emancipatory action may appear, and be recognized by the public (Moran, 2000).
• Critical social work emphasises that our polis, our space that exists between people and groups, has been reducing in size. The limited space has also made it more likely that the social work profession will focus on individual problems (Gallop, 2013). Given the limited space to exercise citizenshipand democratic participation, critical social work brings to light the fact that was not everyone is capable of action, since it involves risk. This is the “real world” box that many of us, at various stages of our lives and practice, find ourselves in. Instead, individuals who are inclined toward action are those who want to make a new beginning (Moran, 2000).
• The political theorisation realm of ‘utopia’ then brings to foray for critical social work the importance of attempting to understand and create this democratic area (Chambon, 1999). Transformative knowledge and practice is meant to disturb commonly held beliefs and ways of doing. This action of creating democratic space involves engaging in a practice of working within and against the rules. As Cynthia Gallop (2013, 11) says that ‘the winding and curving of critical social work practice is an attempt to create the space to maneuver in the real world. It is the space through which to negotiate the hegemonic and destructive forces.
• Finally the overlapping focus of political theory and critical social work is to challenge existing hegemony and achieveideational change. Transformative practice approaches the current hegemonic state as inherently social, rather than natural (Robinson, 2005), and as such recognizes that it can be changed. “A critical reflective approach holds the potential for emancipator practices (Fook, 1999) in that it first questions and disrupts dominant structures and relations and lays the ground for change” (Fook, 2002a, p. 41). A part of freedom from hegemonic forces is expending an effort to be free from Gramsci’s “common sense” (Robinson, 2005), the sense of fatalism and the belief that the world has been and will always be the same. Gramsci discussed the possibility of transformative practice in his concept of “good sense.” It is the critique of common sense that comes from within the subaltern group that has escaped dominant philosophies (Robinson, 2005).

Concluding Remarks

Since critical social work is aimed at a philosophical transformation, understanding political theories are crucial to the domain. The core however is that this linkage should be more voluntaristic, rather than deterministic (Fook, 2002a, 2002b), involving negotiating multiple meanings, and recognizing the many different ways of knowing and understanding: and most importantly, a falseness of the view of the world from the top. The idea is to create a perspective that is constitutive and primary, politically informed and emerging from the worldviews of the marginalised. As Gallop (2013) says, that this should inspire a form of practice which includes reflexive deconstruction and reconstruction motions. The agenda nonetheless needs to be clear, as all political theories have a utopia, lest the neoliberal ideology will ontologically hijack the polity if the transformative agendas are ambivalent or diffused (Carey, 2009).

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