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As the May '68 revolution reached a boiling point, a remarkable assemblage of philosophers, writers, and incarcerated persons, doctors, nurses, social workers, and sociologists, activists and organizers, and militants in France turned their attention to the problem of the prison. At a time when prisons were mostly hidden from view, practically impenetrable in France to outsiders, at a time long before we recognized mass incarceration in countries like the United States, the Prisons Information Group (the Groupe d'information sur les prisons or the "GIP") coalesced to spotlight the travesty of justice that is the prison – one that continues unabated today or, even worse, is exacerbated in Western liberal democracies. As I write these words, people are being violated, slashed, stabbed, and deprived of food and security at the jail on Rikers Island in New York City, with almost a third of the guard staff not even showing up for work. As of mid-October 2021, thirteen people imprisoned at Rikers have died this year. Our jails and prisons are broken – an intolerable crisis, as the GIP maintained already in 1970.

The critique of rights has played a crowning role in critical philosophy. From Hegel to Marx, to Foucault and beyond – Duncan Kennedy, Christoph Menke, the contributors to this Symposium – the critique of rights has always represented an essential and inescapable step in the critique of modern Western society. The reason is plain: conceptions of natural rights, human rights, and civil rights have been central to the founding of modern political thought (from Hobbes, Locke, and Wollstonecraft forward), to the birth and flourishing of legal and political liberalism (in Rawls and Habermas), to the establishment of regimes of civil and political rights, and to the institutionalization of international human rights. Rights are the principal foundation for the discourse and practices of Western liberal democracies. Thus, the critique of rights is an indispensable step in challenging the failures of liberal political theory and liberal legalism. Of this, there is little doubt.

In hindsight, the term "capitalism" was always a misnomer, coined paradoxically by its critics in the nineteenth century. The term misleadingly suggests that the existence of capital produces a unique economic system or that capital itself is governed by economic laws. But that's an illusion. In truth, we do not live today in a system in which capital dictates our economic circumstances. Instead, we live under the tyranny of what I would call "tournament dirigisme": a type of state-directed gladiator sport where our political leaders bestow spoils on the wealthy, privileged elite. We need to displace this tournament dirigisme with a new legal, economic, and political paradigm that favors coöperation and collaboration between those who create, invent, produce, work, and serve others. Rather than corporations that extract capital for the few shareholders and managers, we need coöperatives, mutuals, and nonprofits that distribute the wealth they create widely to everyone in the shared enterprise. The COVID-19 pandemic and economic crash must not prevent us from working together to address the other crisis – climate change – still looming on the horizon. On the contrary, these times call for a legal, political, and economic revolution to ring in a new epoch of coöperationism. This will demand political will. It will not come from our political leaders, so beholden to corporate contributions and capital. It will have to come from us all united.

Critical philosophy has always challenged the division between theory and practice. At its best, it aims to turn contemplation into emancipation, seeking to transform society in pursuit of equality, autonomy, and human flourishing. Yet today's critical theory often seems to engage only in critique. These times of crisis demand more. Bernard E. Harcourt challenges us to move beyond decades of philosophical detours and to harness critical thought to the need for action. In a time of increasing awareness of economic and social inequality, Harcourt calls on us to make society more equal and just. Only critical theory can guide us toward a more self-reflexive pursuit of justice. Charting a vision for political action and social transformation, Harcourt argues that instead of posing the question, "What is to be done?" we must now turn it back onto ourselves and ask, and answer, "What more am I to do?" Critique and Praxis advocates for a new path forward that constantly challenges each and every one of us to ask what more we can do to realize a society based on equality and justice. Joining his decades of activism, social-justice litigation, and political engagement with his years of critical theory and philosophical work, Harcourt has written a magnum opus. ; https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1292/thumbnail.jpg

This essay addresses the problem of truth today in light of the common belief, especially among progressives, that we have entered a post-truth age, as well as of the frequent claim that our post-truth society is the fault of postmodernists and their challenge to the objectivity of truth. The essay does not resolve the strategic question whether the post-truth argument is, as a purely tactical political matter, an effective approach to respond to the onslaught of misrepresentations and lies by President Donald Trump and the New Right. Instead, it explores the post-truth argument from a more synoptic perspective regarding the age-old questions surrounding truth and illusions.

In the final pages of the now-final volume of The History of Sexuality, Volume 4: Les aveux de la chair ("Confessions of the Flesh"), Foucault's intellectual project comes full circle and achieves its long-awaited completion. In those final pages, dedicated to Augustine's treatment of marital sexual relations, Foucault reveals the heretofore missing link that now binds his ancient history of sexual relations to his critique of contemporary forms of neoliberal goverance: Foucault discovers in Augustine's writings the moment of the birth of the modern legal subject and of the juridification of social relations. Like the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle, the appearance of the modern legal subject completes Foucault's critical project and allows us to fold the entire four-volume series of The History of Sexuality back into his critique of contemporary modes of social ordering in the neoliberal age. Many critics of Foucault complain that the turn to subjectivity, to care of the self, and to truth-telling at the end of Foucault's intellectual journey undermines the political force of his philosophy and has pushed contemporary critical thought into a complacent apolitical direction. The now-published Volume 4 of The History of Sexuality should dispel that argument and open the way to integrate those two projects – knowledge-power and subjectivity. That is our greatest task and challenge today: to explore how we have been shaped as subjects in such a way as to implicate ourselves – both willingly and unknowingly – in the social order within which we find ourselves and that, through the interaction of knowledge-power-subjectivity, we reproduce and reestablish ourselves.