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Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Preface -- Introduction: "How Come?" Asked the Befuddled Left -- 1. The Crisis of Capitalism, Almost -- 2. Capitalism Under Scrutiny: From Concept to Critique -- 3. Ideologies for the New Century -- 4. The Life and Times of Democratic Capitalism -- 5. Precarity Capitalism -- 6. What Is Ailing the 99 Percent? -- 7. Getting Unstuck: Overcoming Capitalism Without Crisis, Revolution, or Utopia -- Conclusion: The Radical Pragmatism of Bidding Capitalism Farewell -- Appendix: Summary of Theoretical Framework -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Theories of justice struggle to balance vision and practicality. As with Habermas, the more demanding the ideal of justice, the less connected the theory is to political reality; as with Rawls, the more politically realistic the theory, the weaker its normative criteria, rendering the theory unreliable. Brokering a resolution to the "judgment paradox," Albena Azmanova advances a "critical consensus" model of judgment, which serves the normative ideals of a just society without resorting to ideal theory. Tracing the evolution of two major traditions in political philosophy—critical theory and philosophical liberalism—and the way they confront the judgment paradox, Azmanova critiques prevailing models of deliberative democracy and their preference for ideal theory over political applicability. Instead, she replaces the reliance on normative models of democracy with an account of the dynamics of reasoned judgment, produced in democratic practices of open dialogues. Combining Arendt's study of judgment with Bourdieu's social critique of power relations, and incorporating elements of political epistemology from Kant, Wittgenstein, H. L. A. Hart, Weber, and American philosophical pragmatism, Azmanova centers her inquiry on the way participants in moral conflicts attribute meaning to their grievances of injustice. She then demonstrates the emancipatory potential of the model of judgment she forges and its capacity to guide policy making. The model's critical force derives from the capacity to disclose common structural sources of injustice behind conflicting claims to justice. Moving beyond the conflict between universalist and pluralist positions, Azmanova grounds the question of "what is justice?" in the empirical reality of "who suffers?" to detect attainable possibilities for a less unjust world.

This article presents a blueprint of a feminist agenda for the twenty-first century that is oriented not by the telos of gender parity, but instead evolves as an 'immanent critique' of the key structural dynamics of contemporary capitalism – within a framework of analysis derived from the tenets of Critical Theory of Frankfurt School origin. This activates a form of critique whose double focus on (1) shared conceptions of justice; and (2) structural sources of injustice, allows criteria of social justice to emerge from the identification of a broad pattern of societal injustice surpassing the discrimination of particular groups. In this light, women's victimization is but a symptom of structural dynamics negatively affecting also the alleged winners in the classical feminist agenda of critique. The analysis ultimately produces a model of social justice in a formula of socially embedded autonomy that unites work, care, and leisure.