157
II. A Missing Category: I mentioned above that the authors also concede too much to the
constructivist view. This is the perfect juncture to turn to the second limitation of Crit-
ical Naturalism, in order to address the larger political stakes of the difference between
an additive and a transformative understanding of rational animality. As noted, the
transformative view conceives rationality as a distinctive way of being an embodied
organism, not as something “over and above” organic form. This means that what
counts as flourishing for animals like us is a matter of what we take to count as flour-
ishing. Yet this is not a matter of free-wheeling “social constructivism,” whereby what-
ever we take to be true is true. It is rather a matter of what Hegel grasps as the progres-
sive justifiability of our historical forms of production and reproduction. We learn what
truly counts as flourishing, and which reasons can genuinely circulate in a form of life
as reasons, through a historical process of trying to satisfy our desire to flourish (ulti-
mately, our desire for social freedom). Past, failed forms of life thereby come to func-
tion as partial determinations of what success would require. This raises the question
of the task of a critical theory of the present.
As the authors rightly note, “for a naturalist critical theory, the various normative, epis-
temological, and empirical contributions to social critique are not enough. What mat-
ters is also the reconstruction of the criticized state of affairs” (120). While the term
“capitalism” does occasionally appear in the manifesto, it is not a fundamental category
in the authors’ analysis, which focuses instead on “neoliberalism.” The authors con-
demn the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state and identify its revitalization as
one of their core political aims. Yet in my view, this account suffers from a major blind
spot: Marx’s critical theory of capitalist production. As Marx shows, the way social
wealth is distributed is fundamentally dependent on the way it is produced; the wage
form of modern labour, for example, entails the private ownership of the means of
production. Moreover, the authors fail to consider the systemic reasons for the repeal
of the welfare state in the 70s and 80s: the rise in wages and the rate of employment
led to a proportional decrease in profits and capital investment, which threatened to
curb growth and to destroy jobs. In other words, a return to the welfare state would
engender new crises while leaving untouched the underlying capitalist relations of pro-
duction. Because the Critical Naturalist view is irresolute in its conceptualization of