Review: Towards Justice

Towards Justice: A Critical Theory of Global Society and Politics #

By Marek Hrubec Brill, 2025 (Studies in Critical Social Sciences, vol. 311)

Hrubec, Marek. 2025. Towards Justice: A Critical Theory of Global Society and Politics. Studies in Critical Social Sciences 311. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-72101-2 (hardback), 978-90-04-72102-9 (e-book). DOI 10.1163/9789004721029.

Hrubec opens with the best origin story in recent critical theory. As a student in post-1989 Prague, trained in a Marxism whose obvious basis was history, he encountered Rawls's A Theory of Justice and was baffled: here was a theory that "almost does not work with time," an "incomplete doctoral thesis" installed as the new mainstream not because of its merits but because the West had won the Cold War. Economic and political power, not the level of knowledge, determined what counted as relevant knowledge. That anecdote does real theoretical work. It announces the book's standpoint, Central Europe as "one of the semiperipheries of the West, more precisely a part of the marginalised Global South in the Global North," and its method, which insists that every theory of justice is historically embedded and that the ahistoricism of liberal theory is not an oversight but a symptom. While the book that follows, the first full English statement of a position Hrubec has been building since 2011, offers the most genuinely global reconstruction of critical theory I have encountered in the course's materials, I will argue that its normative principles arrive as a numbered outline rather than an argument, and that its critical suspicion is distributed by geography rather than by merit; the trichotomy at the book's heart never runs symmetrically. The program the anecdote implies remains: a critical theory of global social justice that takes the Global South seriously, reckons with the fall of state socialism from inside the experience, and moves beyond Honneth's recognition paradigm toward what Hrubec calls a paradigm of global interactions.

The architecture and the trichotomy #

The book proceeds in five parts. Part 1 founds the theory on a "trichotomy of critique, explanation, and normativity": critique unmasks unjust social elements and identifies themes; explanation analyzes them and locates "positive fragments of reality"; normativity develops those fragments into principles. Part 2 rereads the history of the Frankfurt School as a succession of paradigms (work, drives, communication and recognition) and positions global interactions as the fourth and current one. Part 3 conducts the critique of liberal and libertarian theory, national and international. Part 4 reconstructs recognition from the private sphere through the transnational level. Part 5 delivers the normative payoff: intercultural "polylogue" and human rights in chapter 9, extraterritorial recognition of the global poor and "strategic socialist structures" in chapter 10, and a conclusion that systematizes the principles of justice.

The trichotomy is the book's most useful methodological contribution, and Hrubec documents well, across Part 2, his claim that it operates implicitly throughout the tradition, from Horkheimer and Marcuse through Habermas, Honneth, Fraser, Young, and Kosík. It gives him a principled answer to the perennial question of where critical theory's norms come from. His "realism of societal development" holds that norms are not constructed but crystallize in real struggles for recognition, so the theorist's job is to identify them, explain their pre-existing fragments, and develop them normatively. The recovery of Czechoslovak critical theory from the 1960s participatory revitalization of socialism, almost invisible in Anglophone accounts of the tradition, is a genuine service, and the inclusion of Kosík alongside the Frankfurt canon quietly redraws the tradition's map.

Where the book earns its title #

The strongest sustained argument comes in chapter 10. Hrubec begins from a Pogge-style provocation that lands hard: the Millennium Development Goals proposed to halve world hunger in fifteen years, and he asks what we would think of Allies who had planned merely to halve the Nazi killing rate over fifteen years. He then does something more interesting than repeat Pogge. He asks why the global poor fail to register as political subjects at all, and answers that dying people are "almost invisible," their discontent never formed into images, so the influential subjects of change are instead the relatively poor who can become aware of their position. From this he develops his most original concept, extraterritorial recognition: forms of social recognition owed across borders to misrecognized subjects who have no standing within the interstate system, implemented so far in only a few cases but existing "as a strong normative requirement." This concept is a real addition to the recognition literature, which has mostly stayed within Honneth's national frame or Fraser's abstract transnationalism, and Hrubec grounds it in the concrete machinery of economic regulation rather than in moral exhortation.

Chapter 9's intercultural "polylogue" is the book's other distinctive move. Hrubec handles human rights disputes with refreshing concreteness: the fundamental problem is not that some cultures reject human rights a priori but that different cultures assert different rights, or the same rights under different interpretations, and the ideological abuse of particular political rights poisons the well. His demand that shared norms come "from the bottom of each culture" rather than by imposition, and his catalogue of convergent mottoes from the EU's "United in Diversity" to Confucian he'erbutong, sketch a quasi-universalism that avoids both relativism and missionary liberalism. In my estimation the chapter is a more careful piece of intercultural theory than most of what circulates under the banner of decolonizing political philosophy.

Normativity announced rather than earned #

The book's central weakness sits exactly where its title points: the theory of justice itself. After three hundred pages of buildup, the principles arrive in the conclusion as a nested outline, Table 7, with numbered items descending to the level of 1.1.1.1 (addressing unmet basic social needs) and 2.1.1.2 (promoting unique cultural and political activities). Hrubec defends the format explicitly. Citing Dussel's dictum that "every theory comes later, it is not a priori," he says it is more appropriate to elucidate the principles "by outline only" than to enclose them in slogan-like theses, and that the interpretation "serves to systematically break down the principles and not to exhaustively define them." But this defense turns a methodological virtue into an alibi. Rawls, whatever his ahistoricism, tells you why the difference principle follows from the original position and what would count against it. Hrubec's principles (meeting basic needs, supporting talent, recognizing merit, solidarity, equal basic and institutional justice) are individually sensible and collectively unargued. Nothing in the outline explains why these principles and not others crystallized from the struggles the book surveys, how conflicts between them get adjudicated, or what the theory rules out. A theory of justice that declines to define its principles has deferred precisely the work the reader was promised.

The deeper problem is a criterion Hrubec never supplies. If norms are read off real struggles for recognition, the theorist needs a way to distinguish emancipatory crystallizations from regressive ones, since xenophobic movements also struggle, also experience their claims as denied recognition, also generate norms. Hrubec knows this in practice (his historical asides on the 1930s show it), but the realism of societal development never states the test. The gap becomes visible in how unevenly the book distributes its suspicion. Liberal international order gets a chapter on its "unsustainability." The market socialism of East Asia, by contrast, enters the narrative as one of the alternatives through which socialist demands "began to take shape," and macro-regional "strategic socialism" is developed in chapter 10 with little of the critical apparatus turned on it. A critical theory whose critique runs at full pressure against Rawls and Nozick but drops to a murmur before actually existing market socialism, with its own formidable machinery of misrecognition, surveillance, and suppressed labor organizing, has not applied its trichotomy symmetrically. The acknowledgments' roll call of interlocutors from Beijing, Havana, and Moscow evidences the global dialogue the book rightly prizes, but dialogue is not exemption, and the book never explains why the crystallized claims of Chinese workers or Cuban dissidents figure so much less than the official alternatives their states represent.

There is also the matter of the book's construction. Hrubec is candid that the theory was articulated in a 2011 Czech outline, debated in commentary volumes, and "gradually reformulated, expanded, and updated." It reads that way. Definitions recur across chapters; the territorial taxonomy of the introduction (international, transnational, supranational, macro-regional, intercultural, extraterritorial, global) gets re-explained more than once; and long stretches of Parts 3 and 4 summarize debates (Rawls on public reason, Honneth's spheres of recognition) familiar to anyone in the field, at a level of detail the argument does not require. The prose compounds this. Sentences routinely carry three qualifications and a parenthesis, and the reader who wants the argument's spine must excavate it.

Verdict #

Here is the most seriously global book in the course's materials, and its standpoint is irreplaceable: a theorist formed inside state socialism's collapse, writing from the semiperiphery, equally fluent in the Frankfurt tradition and in debates from Latin America, China, and Africa that Western critical theory cites more than it reads. The trichotomy, the recovery of the Czechoslovak tradition, and extraterritorial recognition are lasting contributions, and the Pogge-inflected pages on the invisibility of the global poor deserve a place on any global justice syllabus. But the book stands stronger as a map of the field and a program for a theory than as the theory itself. Its principles are outlined where they need to be argued; its realism lacks the criterion that would make it critical rather than merely descriptive; and its suspicion is distributed by geography rather than by merit. Read it for the standpoint and the two final chapters. Press it, everywhere, on the question its own method makes unavoidable: which struggles get to count, and who decides.