Andrew Arato ( ; born 22 August 1944) is a critical theorist and a professor of Political and Social Theory in the Department of Sociology at The New School. He is best known for his influential book Civil Society and Political Theory, coauthored with Jean L. Cohen. He is also known for his work on critical theory and constitutions and was from 1994 to 2014 co-editor of the journal Constellations with Nancy Fraser and Nadia Urbinati.
Education Arato first attended Queens College in New York City, completing his B.A. in history in 1966. Subsequently, Arato moved to the University of Chicago to complete his M.A. in 1968 and Ph.D. in 1975 with a dissertation entitled 'The Search for the Revolutionary Subject: The Philosophy and Social Theory of the Young Lukács 1910-1923' under the guidance of Leonard Krieger and William H. McNeill. In preparation for his dissertation, Arato conducted preliminary research at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in the spring of 1970 under the guidance of Budapest School scholars Ágnes Heller, György Márkus, and Mihály Vajda.
Four stages of Arato's thought A distinct chronology defines Arato's intellectual biography, which often parallels and was inspired by the evolution in thinking of opposition intellectuals in the former communist countries of Eastern EuropeSee the evolution Hungarian thinking detailed in Arato, "Marxism in Eastern Europe” in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, edited by Tom Bottomore (Blackwell, 1998). and, most especially, in Hungary, the country of Arato's birth.Arato’s close association with the Budapest School is recognized by Ágnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér in their 1987 book Eastern Left, Western Left. Arato was involved in the evolution of thinking of Budapest intellectual circles “by virtue of his close contacts and active participation", p. 39. At the same time, much of his work was hammered out in conjunction with his longtime intellectual partner Jean L. Cohen,Arato, From Neo-Marxism to Democratic Theory: Essays on the Critical Theory of Soviet-Type Societies (M. E. Sharpe, 1993), p. XIII. and strongly influenced by the philosophical and sociological work of Jürgen Habermas.Arato, From Neo-Marxism to Democratic Theory: Essays on the Critical Theory of Soviet-Type Societies (M. E. Sharpe, 1993), p. X.
Arato's intellectual itinerary can be simplified into four overlapping stages: It begins with (I) efforts to revitalize Marxism by drawing on a Hegelian Marxist philosophy of "praxis".”In a second phase, (II) Arato worked through the corpus of Western Marxian thinkers to construct a critical theory of state socialist societies. Phase three was (III) marked by a turn to a post-Marxist emphasis on civil society as a moral and analytical category meant to further the project of democratization in both the East and West. Finally, in his latest work, (IV) Arato engages in comparative studies of recent constitution making and has developed a theory of “post-sovereign” constitution making.
First stage: Praxis theory (1971–1979) The first phase of Arato's academic work emphasized the recovery of an early humanistic Hegelian Marxism. Such Hegelian Marxism highlighted the active constitution of the social order through "praxis," that is, the collective action of interacting groups. Arato's philosophical investigations here paralleled the thought of critical intellectuals in the East and especially the "Budapest School" in a “renaissance of Marxism” during the 1960s and early 1970s.See Arato, "Marxism," in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, edited by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman (London, 1987), 389; and Marc Rakovsky, Towards An Eastern European Marxism (London: Allison and Busby, 1978), 130. This perspective was also manifested in the philosophical outlook of the American journal of radical theory Telos. Arato served on Telos’s editorial board from 1971 to 1984.
Arato's emphasis on social praxis and the concomitant categories of subjectivity, culture and alienation was displayed in his dissertation on the early 20th-century Marxian philosophy of György Lukács.Also see his introduction to a special issue of International Journal of Sociology on the Marxian Theory of History (Spring, 1974) As Arato notes in his 1979 book, The Young Lukacs and the Origins of Western Marxism, the elaboration of a critical Western Marxism with its emphasis on intentional collective action or praxis was also intended as a critique of the authoritarian communist governments in Eastern Europe.Andrew Arato and Paul Breines, The Young Lukacs and the Origins of Western Marxism (Seabury Press, 1979), ix-xii. For an articulate survey of this Western Marxist perspective, see Richard Gombin, The Origins of Modern Leftism (Penguin, 1971). Arato's praxis theory and Western Marxism in general privileged the active, democratic participation of groups and individuals in their supposedly collective self-determination, and they criticized orthodox communist parties with their claims to know the true interests of the working class and to be able to make the proper decisions for them in a form of “substitutionalism.” In contrast to the control of the communist state with its enforced passivity of working classes, “true socialism,” said Western Marxists, should be democracy – democracy extended from the political sphere to the economy and indeed to all social institutions. This implicit critique of state socialist societies, however, largely operated at the level of abstract social philosophy. As Hungarian critics Gyorgy Bence and Janos Kis noted, this rebirth of Marxian philosophy in the East “sidestepped the problem of basic class antagonism” intrinsic to the socialist dictatorships of Eastern Europe.Rakovsky, Towards An Eastern European Marxism, 132. Rakovsky is a pseudonym for Bence and Kis.
Mihály Vajda writes that this renaissance of Marxism in the East “cherished hopes” for reform of the socialist systems and hoped to find like-minded reformers in the ruling party. In the 1970s, critical intellectuals lost such hopes and distanced themselves from Marxism as a tool of critical analysis of socialist systems and as a political program. See Vajda, The State and Socialism (Allison & Busby, 1981) 2.
Second stage: State socialism (1979–1981) In the second stage of his intellectual itinerary, Arato made this exact turn from social philosophy to the critical analysis of East European social formations during the late 1970s to the early 1980s.Arato identifies a similar turn among Hungarian critical intellectuals toward analysis of social structure and dynamic after 1968. See his "Marxism in Eastern Europe", 357.
His operating procedure was somewhat scholastic. One after another, Arato examined neo-Marxist analyses of state socialism written by such authors as Herbert Marcuse, Cornelius Castoriadis, Rudolf Bahro, Habermas, and Iván Szelényi. He critically assessed the adequacy of their efforts to analyze the social dynamics, stratification, crisis potentiality and legitimating ideology of state socialist societies. In all this, Arato sought to model himself on Marx by analyzing and criticizing the exploitative, hierarchical dimensions of the social formation. He recognized, however, that the theoretical tools offered by Marx himself – that is, historical materialism – were often used by state socialist societies to veil their politically based class inequalities, not expose them.Arato, From Neo-Marxism to Democratic Theory: Essays on the Critical Theory of Soviet-Type Societies (M. E. Sharpe, 1993). Intro.
Further, Arato argued that Marxian writers were typically trapped by the problematic of Marx's philosophy of history, which could only conceive of two possible modern industrialized social formations – either capitalism or a progressive socialist society. Instead, Arato, along with a number of East European theorists, sought to analyze state socialist societies as a new, hierarchical, exploitative social formation “sui generis”; he understood the communist societies as a unique social formation with its own particular mechanisms of control, exploitation and crisis.See Arato, “Understanding Bureaucratic Centralism,” Telos 35 (Spring 1978) Arato argued that this type of society could not be understood by focusing on market or economic relations, instead it rested on a type of prerogative political control operating through the bureaucratic state.
Arato's essays were collected in the 1993 volume From Neo-Marxism to Democratic Theory: Essays on the Critical Theory of Soviet-Type Societies. Despite the richness of his efforts, Arato saw little connection between his exercises in social system analysis and active social movements aiming to transform state socialism. Indeed, he noted that his type of structural analysis blocked perception of what was new about the rising social movements in Eastern Europe and most especially Poland's Solidarność, which emerged in 1980.Arato, “Marxism in Eastern Europe,” 357 In the late 1980s, Arato “disengaged” with his project of developing a critical theory of authoritarian socialism for a theory that seemed to better capture what was new and essential about the rising social movements and oppositions in Eastern Europe, while also offering a powerful tool to criticize the inadequacies of Western capitalist democracies, that is, the theory of civil society.
This transition, where Arato left his work to the gnawing criticism of mice (to repeat Marx's quip), paralleled similar shifts among East European critical intellectuals.Arato, “Marxism in Eastern Europe” But at the same time, this turn could be said to reflect intrinsic limits to his original project. Arato noted that abstract (ideal typical) models of social system dynamics often failed to incorporate considerations of national histories and cultural traditions, along with inherited social institutions.Arato, “Understanding Bureaucratic Centralism,” 76–77. And see Vajda, State and Socialism, 6. 113–17. And, it is precisely those contested national cultural traditions that form the symbolic resources for movements opposing the authoritarian socialist state (and also, in contrast, legitimating the rule of the communist state).Arato of course, recognized this and engaged in extensive analyses of specific national cultural traditions. See, for example, his "The Budapest School and Actually Existing Socialism," Theory and Society V.16 (1987).
Furthermore, such analyses of systems reproduction (dissecting the dynamics and instrumental logics of state and markets) typically ignores the normative and institutionalized categories of the lifeworld and civil society that might support an autonomous social domain of solidarity and open public communication, which is also the terrain of social movements.See Jean Cohen, Class and Civil Society: The Limits of Marxian Critical Theory (University of Massachusetts Press: 1982) 201–03, 209-, 223.
Third stage: Civil society (1981–1989) It is precisely to these ideal spaces and rights of social autonomy separate from the state, or civil society, that Arato shifted in his third stage. Such a change in intellectual direction was clearly sparked by rising opposition movement of Solidarność in the exciting developments in Poland in 1980–81, resulting in Arato's early articulation of the category of civil society in his oft-cited 1981 essay “Civil Society vs. the State: Poland 1980-1981.”Telos 47 (Spring 1981). At this time, Jean Cohen was defending an ideal of civil society in her dissertation, published in 1982 as Class and Civil Society, 25–36 and see her “Why More Political Theory” in Telos 40 (Summer 1979)