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"The wake of the financial crisis has inspired hopes for dramatic change and stirred visions of capitalism's terminal collapse. Amid populist upheavals, there has been a new flowering of radical critique, and progressive forces are rallying to fight inequality. Yet is the system indeed on the verge of ruin--or even truly challenged by these developments? In Capitalism on Edge, Albena Azmanova offers a novel diagnosis of the current moment to reveal that the potential for sweeping transformation must come from an unexpected direction. Azmanova demonstrates that capitalism is not on its deathbed, revolution is not in the cards, and utopianism cannot steer us toward a brighter future. In order to renew the potential for radical change, she develops a new approach to capitalism that focuses on the dynamics of the pursuit of profit rather than on forms of ownership and patterns of wealth distribution. Azmanova contends that neoliberalism has mutated into a new form of capitalism marked by a state of widespread precarity. In response, she calls for forging a broad alliance of strange bedfellows, who, despite their conflicting grievances, share an interest in fighting this generalized insecurity. Such a coalition could take on capitalism's constitutive dynamics, not merely its unfair outcomes. Azmanova details the prospect of reforms that would enable a radical transformation of the system without a revolutionary break. An iconoclastic rethinking of leftists' most cherished principles, Capitalism on Edge confronts the intellectual and political impasses of our time to discern a new path of emancipation"--

Democracy is in shambles economically and politically. The recent economic meltdown in Europe and the U.S. has substituted democratic deliberation with technocratic decisions. In Athens, Madrid, Lisbon, New York, Pittsburgh or Istanbul, protesters have denounced the incapacity and unwillingness of elected officials to heed to their voices. While the diagnosis of our political-economic illness has been established, remedies are hard to come. What can we do to restore our broken democracy? Which modes of political participation are likely to have an impact? And what are the loci of political inn

Theories of justice struggle to balance vision and practicality. As with Habermas, the more demanding the ideal of justice, the less connected the theory is to political reality; as with Rawls, the more politically realistic the theory, the weaker its normative criteria, rendering the theory unreliable. Brokering a resolution to the "judgment paradox," Albena Azmanova advances a "critical consensus" model of judgment, which serves the normative ideals of a just society without resorting to ideal theory. Tracing the evolution of two major traditions in political philosophy—critical theory and philosophical liberalism—and the way they confront the judgment paradox, Azmanova critiques prevailing models of deliberative democracy and their preference for ideal theory over political applicability. Instead, she replaces the reliance on normative models of democracy with an account of the dynamics of reasoned judgment, produced in democratic practices of open dialogues. Combining Arendt's study of judgment with Bourdieu's social critique of power relations, and incorporating elements of political epistemology from Kant, Wittgenstein, H. L. A. Hart, Weber, and American philosophical pragmatism, Azmanova centers her inquiry on the way participants in moral conflicts attribute meaning to their grievances of injustice. She then demonstrates the emancipatory potential of the model of judgment she forges and its capacity to guide policy making. The model's critical force derives from the capacity to disclose common structural sources of injustice behind conflicting claims to justice. Moving beyond the conflict between universalist and pluralist positions, Azmanova grounds the question of "what is justice?" in the empirical reality of "who suffers?" to detect attainable possibilities for a less unjust world.

This article presents a blueprint of a feminist agenda for the twenty-first century that is oriented not by the telos of gender parity, but instead evolves as an 'immanent critique' of the key structural dynamics of contemporary capitalism – within a framework of analysis derived from the tenets of Critical Theory of Frankfurt School origin. This activates a form of critique whose double focus on (1) shared conceptions of justice; and (2) structural sources of injustice, allows criteria of social justice to emerge from the identification of a broad pattern of societal injustice surpassing the discrimination of particular groups. In this light, women's victimization is but a symptom of structural dynamics negatively affecting also the alleged winners in the classical feminist agenda of critique. The analysis ultimately produces a model of social justice in a formula of socially embedded autonomy that unites work, care, and leisure.