Recent disclosures suggest that many governments apply indiscriminate mass surveillance technologies that allow them to capture and store a massive amount of communications data belonging to citizens and non-citizens alike. This article argues that traditional liberal critiques of government surveillance that center on an individual right to privacy cannot completely capture the harm that is caused by such surveillance because they ignore its distinctive political dimension. As a complement to standard liberal approaches to privacy, the article develops a critique of surveillance that focuses on the question of political power in the public sphere.

Habermas and the Project of Immanent Critique Titus StahlAccording to his own understanding, Jürgen Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action offers a new account of the normative foundations of critical theory.

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This article considers the question 'What makes hope rational?' We take Adrienne Martin's recent incorporation analysis of hope as representative of a tradition that views the rationality of hope as a matter of instrumental reasons. Against this tradition, we argue that an important subset of hope, 'fundamental hope', is not governed by instrumental rationality. Rather, people have reason to endorse or reject such hope in virtue of the contribution of the relevant attitudes to the integrity of their practical identity, which makes the relevant hope not instrumentally but intrinsically valuable. This argument also allows for a new analysis of the reasons people have to abandon hope and for a better understanding of non-fundamental, 'prosaic' hopes. IntroductionIn this article, we want to examine the question 'What makes hope rational?' While much of the current literature on hope focuses on the instrumental rationality of hope, we suggest that instrumental considerations do not exhaust the reasons we can have to hope. To make this argument, we focus on hopes that play a crucial role in how people see and interpret their own lives. Such hopes, even though they may also promote the interests of the relevant agent, are rational primarily because they are constitutive of her practical identity. We call this kind of hope 'fundamental hope', and we argue that the existence of this kind of hope poses a challenge to contemporary theories of hope.Our argument proceeds from Adrienne Martin's recent account of the rationality of hope (Section 1). Martin suggests that what makes hope rational is the practical benefit of engaging in hopeful activities. We argue in Section 2 that this instrumentalism does not fully capture the value of hope.

Critical theories often express scepticism towards the idea that social critique should draw on general normative principles, seeing such principles as bound to dominant conceptual frameworks. However, even the models of immanent critique developed in the Frankfurt School tradition seem to privilege principles over particular moral experiences. Discussing the place that particular moral experience has in the models of Honneth, Ferrara and Adorno, the article argues that experience can play an important negative role even for a critical theory that is committed to the necessity of conceptual mediation, as moral experiences can undermine our confidence in the appropriateness of our moral concepts. Building on McDowell's account of moral perception and Brandom's interpretation of Hegel's theory of experience, one can reconstruct Adorno as providing a "radically negativist" approach to immanent critique that takes particular moral experience seriously.