Review: Another Universalism—Seyla Benhabib and the Future of Critical Theory

Another Universalism: Seyla Benhabib and the Future of Critical Theory #

Edited by Stefan Eich, Anna Jurkevics, and Nishin Nathwani Columbia University Press, 2023 (New Directions in Critical Theory)

Eich, Stefan, Anna Jurkevics, and Nishin Nathwani, eds. 2023. Another Universalism: Seyla Benhabib and the Future of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-21278-6.

Festschrifts have a reputation problem, and it is mostly deserved. Too often they are collections of loosely related essays held together by nothing more than shared affection for the honoree, padded with tributes that read more like toasts than arguments. Another Universalism, gathered from a 2020 conference honoring Seyla Benhabib and published the year after, avoids that trap almost entirely, and it does so through a specific editorial choice worth naming: rather than organizing the volume by discipline, chronology, or contributor prominence, editors Stefan Eich, Anna Jurkevics, and Nishin Nathwani organize it around Benhabib's own conceptual vocabulary—the concrete universal, democratic iteration, jurisgenerativity, deprovincialization. The result is a book that reads less like a tribute and more like a coordinated stress test of one scholar's theoretical apparatus, conducted by twenty-two people who know it from the inside.

An organizing principle that actually organizes #

The volume's six parts track the arc of Benhabib's career in a way that gives each section real argumentative unity rather than the alphabetical or topical grab-bag structure that afflicts so many edited collections in this space. Part I, "Critique, Norm, and Utopia," returns to Benhabib's 1986 book of the same name and interrogates her founding move: mediating Habermasian communicative ethics with Arendtian contingency to produce norms that emerge from concrete struggle rather than abstract reason. Thomas McCarthy's opening chapter presses the hardest version of the obvious objection—does contextualizing universal norms this much eventually dissolve them into relativism?—and the volume is stronger for opening on that note of genuine challenge rather than celebration.

Part II turns to Arendt, whom Benhabib brought into critical theory's canon despite Arendt's own anti-Marxist commitments; Part III to democratic iterations and cosmopolitanism; Part IV to jurisgenerativity and the vexed question of law's emancipatory potential within a tradition descended from Marx; Part V to what the editors and contributors call "deprovincializing" critical theory—pushing a body of thought built by European men in the 1930s and 40s to reckon with decolonization, indigenous rights, and race in ways its first two generations never did. The final part, "Philosophy and Friendship," closes with Benhabib's own intellectual autobiography and Carolin Emcke's essay "Swimming," an unusually personal register for an academic volume, and one that lands harder than it might otherwise given that Drucilla Cornell, whose chapter on transnational decolonization appears in Part V, died before the book went to press.

Where the volume earns its stakes #

The strongest material sits in Parts IV and V, where contributors take Benhabib's frameworks somewhere she did not fully go herself. Matthew Longo's chapter applies jurisgenerativity to state surveillance and big data, arguing that mass data collection replaces the legal presumption of innocence with a logic of "risky until proven safe" that forecloses exactly the kind of contestation democratic iteration depends on—a genuinely contemporary problem addressed with Benhabib's own tools rather than imported ones. Angélica María Bernal's chapter on Pachamama and the Rights of Nature asks directly whether a cosmopolitanism built from European sources can support indigenous movements against extractivism, and answers carefully rather than either dismissing or over-claiming the fit. Ayten Gündoğdu's treatment of border deaths as a form of forced disappearance, read through Fanon rather than only Arendt, does something similar: it uses Benhabib's apparatus to reach a conclusion—that border violence must be understood through the history of colonialism and race, not territorial sovereignty alone—that pushes past where the framework's original architecture was built to go.

Max Pensky's chapter on genocide and jurisgenesis deserves particular mention for using new archival evidence about Raphael Lemkin to complicate Benhabib's own reading of him, showing Lemkin as concerned less with protecting essentialized group identities than with criminalizing state violence against socially designated targets—a case of a Benhabib student correcting Benhabib's history rather than simply extending her theory.

The limits of thinking from inside a framework #

The volume's coherence, though, is bought at a price the editors do not fully address. Because every essay is written in explicit relation to Benhabib's own concepts, the book is better at extending and applying her framework than at testing whether the framework is the right one to begin with. Rainer Forst's chapter comes closest to an external challenge, offering a starker, more power-centered account of politics as "a power struggle—as a struggle for justification," but even this reads as a friendly amendment rather than a rival paradigm. A reader who wonders whether "democratic iteration" and "jurisgenerativity" are doing real theoretical work, as opposed to giving existing normative commitments new names, will not find that question posed directly anywhere in the book. The essays that come closest to independent argument—Longo on data, Bernal on decolonial cosmopolitanism, Threadcraft and Terry's reading of Martin Luther King through Benhabib's "thinking with and against" method—succeed because they put the framework under real strain rather than because anyone in the volume steps outside it to ask if it should hold.

This is, in fairness, close to unavoidable for what the book is: a volume built to honor a living scholar by demonstrating what her ideas can still do, not a symposium designed to adjudicate her place in the tradition. Judged by that standard, it succeeds, and unusually well for the genre.

Verdict #

Another Universalism is a rare festschrift that functions as a genuine contribution to critical theory rather than a monument to one. Its structural decision to organize around Benhabib's own conceptual vocabulary gives the volume an argumentative spine that most multi-author theory anthologies lack, and the strongest chapters—Longo, Bernal, Gündoğdu, Pensky—use that vocabulary to reach genuinely new places, on data surveillance, indigenous rights, border violence, and the history of genocide law. What it does not offer, and does not claim to, is a hostile cross-examination of whether democratic iteration and jurisgenerativity are the right conceptual tools for the crises the book addresses. For readers already convinced that Benhabib's third-generation critical theory is the right starting point, this is an essential and often moving map of where that theory can still go. For readers looking to be convinced of that starting point in the first place, the case has to be found elsewhere.