Emancipation as a Political and Practical Concept

This paper focuses on the value of emancipation and its application to modern political decision-making systems. Emancipation is a key value for theorists of, so-called, critical theory (Bohman 2005) as well as critically oriented deliberative democrats. For these theorists, the aim of the theory is to seek ‘emancipation from slavery, (…) [to] act as liberating (…) influence’ (Horkheimer 1972: 246) and ‘for a subject to be able to break from any heteronomous pre-determined role’ (Chambers 2013: 147-8). Critical theory has also a practical aim as it should ‘explain what is wrong with current social reality, identify the actors to change it, and provide both clear norms for criticism and achievable practical goals for social transformation’ (Bohman 2005). However, these two aims can be in tension. Currently, emancipation is used in its negative understanding as an absence of certain features or characteristics. However, such negative definition is often incompatible with requirements of decision-making in political circumstances. As a result, this essay provides a conceptual analysis of the notion of emancipation and argues for its positive but external notion as a suitable one for the critical endeavour. This paper proceeds as follows. I start by evaluating desiderata for the concept of emancipation which is suitable for describing decision-making system. I continue with the analysis of various dimensions that the concept of emancipation can take. Here, I distinguish positive and a negative notion of the concept of emancipation, external versus internal concept as well as emancipation as a state of affairs versus emancipation as a process. I show that the concept of emancipation which is best suitable for the description of the political decision-making systems is emancipation in its positive but external form. I further engage in an analysis of possible understanding of such notion of emancipation which can replace most commonly used a notion of emancipation as breaking free from domination. The contribution of this paper is of two kinds. First, this paper is aimed at the widely interpreted critical theory and deliberative democracy and its objective of providing a theory of emancipation which has practical implications. The paper argues that the positive and external notion of emancipation, if carefully defined, can successfully replace the negative notion of emancipation. This enables critical theory to realise its practical aim. At the same time, this provides suggestions for the development of the empirically-oriented research. More precisely, it analyses how emancipation can be interpreted in terms of requirements of decision-making systems. This, in turn, enables comparative analysis or a design of institutional change for making particular decision-making more emancipatory. The second contribution concerns the analysis of the concept of emancipation and providing a novel taxonomy of this concept which provides a positive guideline for practically oriented deliberative democrats.