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Our actions are informed by the consideration of reasons; reasons which constructivism suggests are not simply discovered, but made by us. This book examines this view, elaborating its basic idea into a fully-fledged account of practical reasons, making its theoretical commitments explicit, and defending it against well-known objections.

This book complements and balances the attention given by postcolonial theory to the revitalisation and recognition of the agency of colonised peoples. It offers new conceptual scaffolding to those who have inherited the legacy of colonial privilege, and who now seek to responsibly transform this historical injustice. Simone Bignall attends to a minor tradition within Western philosophy including Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze, to argue that a non-imperial concept of social and political agency and a postcolonial philosophy of material transformation are embedded within aspects of poststructuralist social philosophy. Contributing to contemporary philosophical inquiry about desire, power and transformative agency, Postcolonial Agency constitutes a timely intervention to debates in poststructuralist, postcolonial and postmodern studies. Beginning with a critical treatment of the dialectical notions that dominate much postcolonial theory, Bignall then outlines a constructive and transformative theory of practice by drawing from Foucault and Deleuze. The resulting rapprochement between poststructuralism and postcolonialism coincidentally provides a fresh perspective on the political potential of Deleuzian thought. Postcolonial Agency provides readers with a significantly new understanding of the processes of social transformation faced by many societies as they struggle with the aftermath of empire. It does so by engaging readers with respect to their affective communities and their concrete ethics of relationship, providing them with a valuable new way of conceptualising practices of postcolonial sociability. It is of interest to students in political and postcolonial studies, cultural studies, critical theory and Continental philosophy.

In this dissertation I show that constructivist liberal philosophers are confronted by a dilemma. On the one hand, the conceptions of persons that they appeal to are so thin that contradictory conclusions can be derived from those very same conceptions. Where one philosopher thinks that his or her conception excludes the capitalistic economic liberties from the list of basic rights, it is possible to show with great plausibility the opposite conclusion and vice-versa. The status of the capitalist economic liberties carries significant implications not only for the structure of the economy but also for the place and role of other normative values that more directly affect other areas of life. If it can be shown that a conception of persons leads to contradictory results when it comes to the status of the economic liberties in particular, then the general shape of society will change in significant and inevitable ways as well. In order to avoid this horn of the dilemma, some philosophers seek to thicken their conceptions of persons. In doing so, I maintain that they come to beg too many questions and subsequently undermine whatever normative conclusions they sought to derive from their conception of persons. I analyze this connection within the context of the theories of political philosophers writing from different traditions of liberal thought. To do so I first distinguish between how the concept of personhood has been employed in moral philosophy as opposed to political philosophy. The chapters then move from liberal theories more progressively oriented, such as John Rawls's theory of justice, to more moderate positions, such as John Tomasi's market democracy, to Robert Nozick's libertarianism. In the first two cases I argue that the conceptions of persons employed by Rawls and Tomasi are thin, and that it is possible to show that their conceptions lead to conclusions in conflict with their own stated positions. In the case of libertarianism, I argue that libertarians generally construe self-ownership thickly ...

This paper aims to investigate whether and in what respects the conceptions of the body and of agency that Judith Butler develops in Bodies That Matter are useful contributions to feminist theory. The discussion focuses on the clarification and critical assessment of the arguments Butler presents to refute the charges of linguistic monism and determinism.

The social theoretic turn inaugurated under the rise of constructivism in International Relations has, among other themes, created a much-enlarged space for treating norms as efficacious explanatory variables in analyses of world politics. In this article, I reconstruct mainstream constructivists' inclinations toward what I argue are sociological accounts of norms, in which the question of the latter's justification is comprehensively sidelined. I initially show how constructivists' strategy of delineating their approaches from Critical Theory and post-structural analyses sustains social theoretic commitments, which compound this problem. In the second part of the article, I focus on Richard Price's programmatic attempt to reconcile the constructivist achievements in empirical research on the efficacy of norms with normative theorizing. The idea of building a bridge from 'isses' to 'oughts' labors, as I demonstrate, from the outset under construction problems, which cannot be resolved on the premises from which Price seeks to operate. Concluding this part, I consider the possibility of supplementing Price's account with consequentialist normative theory, and demonstrate that this would incur further problems for a normative theoretic framework for the study of world politics. In the final part, I outline key themes of Critical Theory with the aim of addressing some persistent misunderstandings about its scope, social theoretic outlook, and normative commitments. Linking back to the critical appraisal of mainstream constructivism's norm-sociological commitments, I suggest that despite some important limitations of its own, Critical Theory is in a better position to address 'isses' and 'oughts' than constructivists' readings of it would suggest. [Reprinted by permission; copyright Sage Publications Ltd. & ECPR-European Consortium for Political Research.]

In Political Liberalism, John Rawls describes a metaethical procedure -- political constructivism -- whereby political theorists formulate political principles by assembling and reworking ideas from the public political culture. To many of his moral realist and moral constructivist critics, Rawls's procedure is simply a recent version of the "popular moral philosophy" that Kant excoriates in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. In this article, I defend the idea of political constructivism on philosophical and political grounds. Initially, I argue that political constructivism is the best available methodology for self-legislating, socially embedded and fallible human beings; then I show that political constructivism may produce principles that could garner the principled assent of Euro-American Muslims such as Taha Jabir Al-Alwani. The article concludes by considering how political constructivism might be employed to formulate new political principles for Euro-American societies experiencing and confronting the Islamic revival. Adapted from the source document.

If evaluators do not borrow from the natural and social sciences for their methods, what do their enquiries look like? Many who seek to answer that question pursue naturalistic or case study or qualitative approaches, conceived of as a reaction to scientism to produce a more faithful response to the social and political nature of the world being evaluated. Among those approaches is constructivism, familiar in the philosophy of science, science education and psychology. This is a general critique of science for its failure to acknowledge that theories and realities are not 'out there' waiting to be discovered or uncovered, but are constructed in the minds of individuals or in the discourses of groups. This article looks critically at constructivism as it has appeared in the field of evaluation and presents it as an overreaction to the problems of objective reality.