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MIGRATION,
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC PURPOSE
DIASPORAS AND CITIZENSHIP
Pathology Diagnosis
and Social Research
New Applications and Explorations
Edited by
Neal Harris
Political Philosophy and Public Purpose
Series Editor
Michael J. Thompson, William Paterson University
New York, NY, USA
This series offers books that seek to explore new perspectives in social
and political criticism. Seeing contemporary academic political theory and
philosophy as largely dominated by hyper-academic and overly-technical
debates, the books in this series seek to connect the politically engaged
traditions of philosophical thought with contemporary social and political
life. The idea of philosophy emphasized here is not as an aloof enterprise,
but rather a publicly-oriented activity that emphasizes rational reflection
as well as informed praxis.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14542
Neal Harris
Editor
Pathology Diagnosis
and Social Research
New Applications and Explorations
Editor
Neal Harris
Oxford Brookes University
Oxford, UK
ISSN 2524-714X ISSN 2524-7158 (electronic)

Political Philosophy and Public Purpose
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Series Editor’s Foreword
Erich Fromm once asked from the vantage point of the mid-1950s, “can a
society be sick?” The question was posed at the apex of the “affluent soci-
ety”, an age of unprecedented social wealth and post-subsistence society
was emerging. It was also a time when modern medicine, vaccines and
other modern therapies for dealing with physical maladies were reaching
unprecedented efficacy. But Fromm saw that, just as Marx had a century
earlier, that modernity was ill, that it suffered from a de-humanising
pattern of pathologies that could be diagnosed and cured. Today it is
still not difficult, when skimming newspapers and popular journals, to
discover evidence for the thesis that modern society is ill. Fromm believed
that a critical, humanistic form of reason would be able to root out
the causes of social pathology—of alienation, reification, personal psychic
suffering—and usher in a new sense of freedom and humane existence.
Although it was once at the origin of modern social science, the
concept of social pathology has fallen out of favour in recent decades.
Although thinkers such as Rousseau, Hegel, Marx and Durkheim remain
the progenitors of the idea that societies as whole entities can suffer
from pathologies, the ontological paradigms of much of mainstream social
science have marginalised thinking about macro social entities as having
distinct properties and features. As methodological individualism reshaped
the social sciences and social theory, the idea that only individuals can
suffer and that only individuals can be healed became prevalent. The idea
that the origins of individual suffering was social, that there were systemic
v
vi SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
and social-ontological mechanisms—such as the way modern societies

were organised and the kinds of values and norms that they made preva-
lent—responsible for the ways that individual suffering emerged in the
first place, was gradually put out of sight. Methodological holism—the
view that society as a whole could be understood as the explanatory unit
of analysis—was increasingly seen as wishy-washy metaphysics, not suited
to the world of analytic reason and modern science.
This view has begun to shift. Emerging largely out of the critical theory
tradition, the concept of social pathology persisted and was brought back
into currency with the work of Axel Honneth and his attempt to diagnose
social pathology as defects in recognitive relations. But we can now see
that social pathology is expanding beyond these narrow concerns. Neal
Harris’ work has been at the forefront of a new generation of critical
theorists that have decided to go back to the original themes and theo-
ries of critical theory in order to refresh our thinking about the nature
of social pathology and the kinds of defects that rationalised, capitalist
society engenders. This collection of essays is rich as well as novel. Each
paper in the volume seeks to move us towards a more holistic approach to
social pathology, one not restricted to pathologies of communication or
recognition alone, but also to the kinds of social irrationality that plagues
modern capitalist forms of the social organisation no less than the psycho-
logical states of the self. Harris, himself an important emerging voice in
critical theory with an expertise in social pathology theory, has been able
to turn our attention to new themes and new questions. In doing so,
he has placed critical social theory on a more politically engaged plane, a
course that should inspire others who seek social change and continue the
collective effort to make the world rational.
Gramercy Park, NYC Michael J. Thompson

Winter 2020
Preface
In the summer of 2019, Heinz Sünker organised a conference at the

University of Wuppertal to mark the 50th anniversary of Adorno’s
passing. The event brought together an otherwise disparate band of Crit-
ical Theorists to reflect on Adorno’s life and work, and the continuing
impact of his Critical Theory today. While of the final contributors to this
volume only Gerard Delanty, Michael J. Thompson and I participated in
the conference, the origins of this project truly lie in Wuppertal, and three
particular themes were discussed at length.
The first of these was the continuation of an ongoing dialogue with
Gerard Delanty on the fading sociological core of Critical Theory. The
Institute for Social Research, while heavily inflected with left-Hegelian
philosophy, originated as a site for the analysis of the immanent contra-
dictions within the social world: a primarily interdisciplinary-sociological
consideration. Delanty’s panel at the conference spoke to these sociolog-
ical roots, and the importance of the distinctly immanent-transcendent
project Adorno advanced. In the face of the increasing swamping of the
sociological component of Critical Theory by Rawlsian and neo-Idealist
currents, it felt timely to produce a volume that sought to return social
research to the centre of the conversation. This is not a territory marking
exercise; Critical Theory has always aspired to be self-consciously inter-
disciplinary. Rather, this attempt to “re-sociologise” Critical Theory is
presented to maintain this cross-disciplinary engagement. For it to remain
vii
viii PREFACE
relevant, Critical Theory must always aspire to be more than another

flavour of theory of justice.
The second theme inspiring this volume is the increasing ‘domestica-
tion’ of Critical Theory, to use Michael J. Thompson’s turn of phrase. A
joy of reading Adorno, and of discussing his work, is the true hostility
and devastating negativity on display towards capitalist irrationality. Such
political and philosophical commitments are ironically absent in the work
of leading Critical Theorists, such as Honneth, even as we witness the
impeding cataclysms of global warming and insurgent neo-fascisms. While
Adorno’s “praxis” of combating reified consciousness through esoteric
critique was (perhaps) reasonably snubbed as bourgeois pretension by the
soixante-huitards, today it is almost as if the view from the Ivory Tower
has become too ghastly to comprehend, and a self-protecting retreat has
been sounded. While in the face of an increasingly unstoppable ecocide
this is not necessarily a poor move from a clinical “defence mechanism”
standpoint, many conference attendees felt Critical Theory still harboured
a potency to challenge structures of domination and should not retreat to
an opiate for the weary, defeated mind, facing insurmountable odds.
Finally, in editing this volume I was conscious of the increasingly
fractured nature of contemporary Critical Theory. A purported “Critical
Theory” reader might today incorporate Foucault’s biopolitics, Debord’s
psychogeography and Lacanian psychoanalysis, without mention of Social
Pathology, Minima Moralia or Dialectic of Enlightenment. The increasing
breadth and development of the field are only positive, and any attempt
to restrict Critical Theory to the veneration of a first-generation German
canon smacks of a futile conservatism. Rather, the fracturing of Critical
Theory today is damaging in that it risks losing theoretical coherence:
while Foucault and Debord offer much to the contemporary researcher,
they cannot be conveniently integrated within the ambit of Erich Fromm
and Walter Benjamin. These are theorists with clearly differentiated theo-
retical foundations; attempts at a synthesis, while often productive, require
careful consideration. Further, with the increasing investment in post-
structuralist theorisation, the centrality and unambiguity of a hostility to
capitalist reification is lost: Foucault’s work (or perhaps readings of his
work) is/are more amenable to neoliberalism than his myriad devotees
admit. In this regard, the collection seeks to bring together disparate
voices and new approaches while maintaining an immanent-transcendent
PREFACE ix
methodology, seeking to anchor a broad, contemporary Critical Theory

within a dialectical and pathology diagnosing imagination.
Oxford, UK Neal Harris

Winter 2020
Contents
1 Introduction: Social Pathology and Social Research 1

Neal Harris
Part I Explorations in Contemporary Social Pathology

Diagnosis
2 The Pathogenesis of Brexit: Pathologies of British
Political Modernity 23
Gerard Delanty
3 Pathologies of Reason in Computational Capitalism:
A Speculative Diagnosis of Our Computational
Worldview 47
James Stockman
4 Pathologies of Digital Communication: On
the Ascendancy of Right Populism 73
Estevão Bosco and Wagner Costa Ribeiro
Part II Ontological and Epistemological Considerations

in Social Pathology Scholarship
5 An Ontological Account of Social Pathology 113
Michael J. Thompson
xi
xii CONTENTS
6 Who Is Ill When a Society Is Ill? 141

Onni Hirvonen
7 A Biopolitical Account of Social Pathology: Viewing
Pathology as a Political-Ontological Issue 163
Yonathan Listik
Part III Beyond Pathologies of Recognition: New Voices,

New Directions
8 Rawlsian Liberalism as a Failure of Critique 193
Ane Engelstad
9 The Revolt of the Maladjusted: Defacing the Currency
of Social Pathology Diagnosis in Contemporary
Critical Theory 221
Denis C. Bosseau
10 The Challenge of Postcapitalism: Non-Capitalist
Temporalities and Social Pathology 253
Onur Acaroglu
11 The Future of Pathology Diagnosing Social Research 275
Neal Harris and James Stockman
Index 283
Notes on Contributors
Onur Acaroglu is an instructor at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey

and a co-founder and tutor at the Free University of London (FUL),
UK. He is assistant editor at the Marx and Philosophy Review of Books
(MPRB) and author of Rethinking Marxist Approaches to Transition: A
Theory of Temporal Dislocation (Brill, 2020). His interests include social
theory and Western Marxism.
Estevão Bosco is a Critical Social Theorist. He is a postdoctoral
researcher at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, a Fellow of the São Paulo
Research Foundation, and the coordinator of the RedSars2 network at the
Latin-American College of Global Studies (FLACSO/Brazil). Previously,
Dr. Bosco was a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, UK,
and a Research Associate at the University of Campinas, Brazil. He is the
author of multiple journal articles, book chapters, and the book Sociedade
de risco: introdução à sociologia cosmopolita de Ulrich Beck (Annablume
and São Paulo Research Foundation, 2016).
Denis C. Bosseau is a doctoral student at the Research Centre for Social
and Political Thought (SPT) at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.
His research focuses on contemporary strategies of resistance with partic-
ular attention given to practices of whistleblowing and the emancipatory
effects of acephalic social movements of contestation, like that of the
Gilet Jaune in France, seeing how such forms of contestation can serve as
sources of inspiration for a re-politicisation of critical practice within the
xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
field of critical theory. He is co-editor on a proposed collection of cross-

disciplinary essays in critical theory, indicatively titled Critical Theory in
(A Time of) Crisis.
Wagner Costa Ribeiro is Professor of Geography at the University
of São Paulo, Brazil. Dr. Ribeiro has held visiting appointments at the
University of Barcelona, the University of Salamanca, the University of
Seville, Spain, and the University of Caldas, Colombia. He is the author
of several journal articles, book chapters, and books, including: A Ordem
Ambiental Internacional (Contexto, 2001 and 2005) and Geografia
política da água (Annablume, 2008).
Gerard Delanty is Professor of Sociology and Social & Political Thought
at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. His most recent publication
is Critical Theory and Social Transformation (Routledge, 2020). His
other publications include: The Cosmopolitan Imagination (Cambridge
University Press, 2009), Formations of European Modernity, 2nd edition
(Palgrave, 2019), Community 3rd Edition (Routledge, 2018), and The
European Heritage: A Critical Re-Interpretation (Routledge, 2018). He
has edited many volumes, including the Routledge International Hand-
book of Cosmopolitan Studies, 2nd edition (2019) and, with Stephen P.
Turner, the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Social and Political
Theory (2011). His most recent volume is Pandemics, Society and Poli-
tics: Critical Reflections on Covid-19 (De Gruyter, 2021). He is also the
Chief Editor of the European Journal of Social Theory.
Ane Englestad is a philosopher working on the concept of injustice and
critiques of mainstream political philosophy at the University of Sussex,
Brighton, UK. She is the former editor of Marx and Philosophy Review
of Books (MPRB).
Neal Harris is a Lecturer in Sociology at Oxford Brookes University,
Oxford, UK. He has published research in the European Journal of
Social Theory, Social Science Information, Thesis Eleven, International Soci-
ology, the Marx and Philosophy Review of Books, and Studies in Social
and Political Thought. His work focuses on the Critical Theory tradi-
tion, past and present. He is currently working on two main projects: a
monograph on the foundations of pathology diagnosing Critical Theory,
to be published with Manchester University Press (2022), and a co-
edited volume with Onur Acaroglu, indicatively titled: Thinking Beyond
Neoliberalism: Theorising Transition and Resistance (Palgrave, 2021).
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
Onni Hirvonen is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Department of

Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. His
research interests include the Hegelian philosophy of recognition, critical
social philosophy, and contemporary social ontology. Hirvonen’s recent
publications analyse collective responsibility, recognition and work, and
populism.
Yonathan Listik is a doctoral candidate in Philosophy at the Univer-
sity of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He was previously a researcher
and Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Essex, Colchester,
UK. His research focuses on political philosophy, specifically on the
connections between contemporary ontology in the continental tradition,
political theory, and aesthetics.
James Stockman is a Critical Theorist and doctoral candidate working
in the field of Digital Media at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.
He is a member of the editorial collective for the journal Studies in Social
& Political Thought, and he works as a Doctoral Tutor in the Department
of Media & Communications at the University of Sussex.
Michael J. Thompson is Professor of Political Theory in the Depart-
ment of Political Science at William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, USA.
His most recent books are The Specter of Babel: A Reconstruction of Polit-
ical Judgment (SUNY, 2020) as well as the forthcoming, Twilight of
the Self: Cybernetic Society and the Eclipse of Autonomy (Stanford) and
Perversions of Subjectivity: Public Reason and its Discontents (Routledge).
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Social Pathology and Social

Research
Neal Harris
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought dramatic changes to our social,

economic and political systems. Hidden among the startling statistics
from demographers and epidemiologists lies a predictable reality: the
fortunes of the world’s billionaires ‘increased by more than a quarter’
between April and July 2020 (Neate, 2020). The crude dynamic of the
rich disproportionately profiting, and the poor disproportionately dying,
was replicated at both a global and a national level (Harvey, 2020). True
to form, the popular press attempted to displace critical political economy
with xenophobia (Ong & Lasco, 2020), yet such efforts met with
only partial success. With COVID-19 disclosing the myriad irrationali-
ties of neoliberal governance, social critique returned with a vengeance,
increasingly framing capitalism itself within the language of pathology.
Making this connection most explicitly was the ubiquitous activist banner
N. Harris (B)
Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK
e-mail: nharris@brookes.ac.uk
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
N. Harris (ed.), Pathology Diagnosis and Social Research,
Political Philosophy and Public Purpose,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70582-4_1
2 N. HARRIS
declaring: ‘Capitalism Is The Virus’. At the same time as this resur-

gent challenge to neoliberal hegemony, the importance of considered
government intervention is likewise being showcased globally (Pickhard-
Whitehead, 2020). Political parties whose leaders had recently declared
that there was ‘no such thing as society’, and who had triumphed the
shrinking of the welfare state, suddenly competed to demonstrate their
respective competence at centralised administration. The lie that an inter-
nationalist neoliberalism offers the optimal means of social organisation
was instantly forgotten. As in wartime, protectionism and state inter-
vention rapidly became the accepted orthodoxy. The spectacular failure
of neoliberalism to offer meaningful solutions, and the comparative ease
and joy with which solidaristic mutual aid networks flourished, provided
a stark juxtaposition (see Nelson, 2020). The present conjuncture evinces
both a renewed critique of capitalism as distinctly ‘pathological’, while
enabling tangible alternatives to emerge.
While the pandemic brought virological imagery to the fore, there has
long been a rich tradition of anchoring socio-political critique within the
framing of ‘pathology’ (Honneth, 2000, 2007; Fromm, 2010 [1991];
Neuhouser, 2012, inter alia). The development of pathology diagnosing
social criticism can be tracked not only within the classics of Western
philosophy, from Socrates’ attack on Glaukon’s ‘fevered’ ‘city of pigs’
in the Republic (371bff) through to Rousseau’s attack on civil society
in the Second Discourse (1984 [1762]), but also within Indian ‘New
World’ teachings, for instance, the Theosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti
(2008). Political scientists (Mudde, 2010), criminologists (Sutherland,
1945; Best, 2007) and psychoanalysts (Freud, 1953) have likewise devel-
oped the heurism in various directions. However, while these diverse
schools have all influenced what it means to diagnose social pathologies,
the framing maintains a particular significance within Frankfurt School
Critical Theory. Here, the language of ‘pathology’ has been mobilised
to enable researchers to push beyond the liberal imagination of ‘justice’
and ‘legitimacy’, thus emboldening social research to identify a plethora
of distinct, and often more foundational, challenges to the existing social
order (Honneth, 2000). It is this Critical Theoretical understanding of
social pathology which this volume seeks to extend.
1 INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL PATHOLOGY AND SOCIAL RESEARCH 3
1 Social Pathology and Critical Theory

Frankfurt School Critical Theory offers an interdisciplinary approach
to social research that marshals concepts and methodologies from left-
Hegelian philosophy, Marxism, psychoanalysis, epistemology, sociology
and aesthetics, to interrogate how socio-political structures shape the
consciousness and behaviour of social subjects. Hegel’s critique of Kant’s
Idealist philosophy is thus of central importance for Critical Theory.
While Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (2007 [1781]) explored noumenal,
universal Ideas, discoverable a priori, Hegel offered a conception of
Reason which was distinctly socio-historical. For Hegel, Geist (‘reason’
or ‘spirit’) was emerging, or ‘unfolding’, within both the social and
the natural world, working through its latent contradictions. Indeed, as
Hegel would claim in both the Phenomenology of Spirit (1970 [1807])
and Science of Logic (2015 [1816]), the cognition of social subjects is
fundamentally connected to this dialectical working through of the incon-
sistencies immanent within the social world. Reason, for Hegel, is thus
a distinctly social reality, connected to the development of macro-social
logics and processes: how one thinks, as much as what one thinks, is
socially dependant. For Axel Honneth (2007), the ‘explosive charge’ of
Critical Theory derives from its focus on the ‘pathologies’ manifest within
this ‘thicker’, social understanding of rationality.
While Honneth is one of the most prominent contemporary figures
associated with the Frankfurt School today, Critical Theory is held to
have passed through three distinct ‘generations’ (Jay, 1996 [1973]). At its
inception in 1923, the Institute for Social Research [Institut für Sozial-
forschung ] practised an unremarkable orthodox Marxist economics. It was
Max Horkheimer’s appointment as director of the institute in 1930 which
brought methodological innovation and the idiosyncratic fusion of disci-
plines; welcoming psychoanalysts, sociologists, philosophers and literary
theorists. First-generation Critical Theory is thus typified not only by the
work of Max Horkheimer, but also by that of Theodor Adorno, Herbert
Marcuse, Erich Fromm and Walter Benjamin (see Jay, 1996).
Working together, Adorno and Horkheimer developed a strikingly
negative and dialectical account of society, culminating in their co-
authored Dialectic of Enlightenment (1979 [1944]) and Adorno’s (2005
[1951]) Minima Moralia. Centring the left-Hegelian analysis of social
rationality, the authors identified deep-seated pathologies within the
foundations of contemporary thought. Free-market capitalism, Soviet
4 N. HARRIS
state capitalism and the horrors of the Nazi fascistic terror were held
to be manifestations of a deformed, ‘pathological’ irrationality. Enlight-
enment thought itself, declared Adorno and Horkheimer, with self-
conscious hyperbole, ‘has extinguished any trace of its self-consciousness’
and has become ‘ultimately self-destructive’ (Adorno & Horkheimer,
1979 [1944]: 4). Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse served to
inject a Freudian-Marxian synthesis to these conversations. Fromm’s
humanist Marxism (1963, 2010) spoke explicitly of the ‘insane society’
and a ‘pathological normalcy’, while Marcuse (1977 [1941]) brought
a phenomenological lens with his critique of a pathological ‘one-
dimensionality’ to the modern social experience. Walter Benjamin’s (2008
[1935], 1978) work added yet further nuance and eclecticism, intro-
ducing the concerns of temporality, redemption and the messianic. While
these theorists approached social research with differing inflections, they
all shared a strong conviction in the need to conduct a deeper form of
social criticism, to disclose the contradictions within the dominant form
of life (Honneth, 2000).
First-generation Critical Theory enabled incisive social critique, yet
Adorno’s increasing emphasis on philosophical negativity, and his belief
in the emancipatory potential of abstract art, failed to resonate with the
dynamic political activism of the late 1960s (see Jarvis, 1998: 90–123;
124–147). As Fromm and Marcuse moved to develop Critical Theory
in directions more in keeping with the zeitgeist, first-generation Critical
Theory’s metaphysics seemed increasingly antiquated and paralysing. In
this context, Jürgen Habermas (1972, 1984) attempted to offer radi-
cally new theoretical and normative foundations, forging what has since
become known as the ‘second generation’ of Critical Theory. Developed
in Knowledge and Human Interests (1972 [1968]) and extended in his
Theory of Communicative Action (1984 and 1987 [1981]), Habermas
offered a new grounding for Critical Theory, anchored less explicitly
in left-Hegelianism. Synthesising insights from pragmatics, hermeneu-
tics, analytic philosophy and developmental psychology, Habermas sought
an unambiguously post-metaphysical Critical Theory (see Rasmussen,
1991). With Habermas, Frankfurt School social research increasingly
focused on identifying pathologies of systematically distorted commu-
nication; instances where systemic logics overdetermine the possibili-
ties for communicative exchange and deliberation within the lifeworld.
While Habermas served to rehabilitate pathology diagnosing, normatively
undergirded social research, his account was comparatively distanced
from the explicitly anti-capitalist agenda of his predecessors. Michael J.

Thompson (2016) thus reads Habermas’ work as presaging the ‘domes-
tication of Critical Theory’, sacrificing political radicalism at the altar of
institutional credibility.
While some Critical Theorists today retain a primary investment in
a Habermasian methodology (see Bosco and Wagner’s contribution to
this volume), Axel Honneth’s Critical Theory of Recognition is widely
credited with providing the foundations for a ‘third generation’ of Frank-
furt School scholarship. Honneth’s Struggle for Recognition accelerated
Habermas’ post-Marxian, post-metaphysical approach to Critical Theory
(Thompson, 2016), increasingly centring a micro-sociological intersub-
jective analysis. Developing the young Hegel’s Jena writings, Honneth
argues that the subject’s affective experience(s) of ‘misrecognition’ can
serve as an immanent entry point for social critique (Honneth, 1995
[1992]; see Delanty & Harris, 2021). This approach has been highly
influential and has brought Frankfurt School theorists into dialogue
with a variety of applied practitioners and traditionally more liberal
disciplines (see Laitinen et al., 2015; see Hirvonen’s contribution to
this volume). Yet, despite the undeniable proliferation of recognition-
theoretical approaches among social researchers, Honneth’s framework
has been highly divisive, with philosophical (Thompson, 2016), feminist
(McNay, 2007), decolonial (Coulthard, 2014; see Bosseau’s contribu-
tion to this volume) and political-economic (Fraser & Honneth, 2001)
objections being raised.
While scholars invested in a first-generation Hegelian-Marxism may
lament the degeneration of the Frankfurt School programme into
a neo-Idealist and politically quiescent irrelevance (Thompson, 2016;
Kouvelakis, 2019), the centrality of pathology diagnosing social research
persists, albeit in a drastically ‘domesticated’ form. Unlike Ideal theo-
retical approaches (see Engelstad’s chapter), social research employing a
Frankfurt School methodology remains (theoretically, at least) anchored
in the critique of the immanent contradictions manifest within the
lifeworld. Pathology diagnosing Frankfurt School research is thus funda-
mentally an endeavour committed to offering a form of normative social
criticism, probing beyond the empirically observable, to analyse struc-
tures, learning processes and socio-political dynamics (see the chapters by
Delanty; Stockman; Bosco and Ribeiro; Acaroglu). As Strydom (2011)
and Delanty (2020) have highlighted, the methodological commit-
ment which undergirds this research is an investment in immanent-
transcendence; identifying the possibilities for a less-contradictory form
of social life that exist latent within the present social order.
6 N. HARRIS
2 Pathology Diagnosing Social

Research Today: Three Existential Crises
Despite the critical-explanatory potential of Frankfurt School research,
and the potency of pathology diagnosing social critique, Critical Theory
today sits in an increasingly precarious position within the academy. Three
potentially existential crises can be identified, which threaten the future
of Critical Theory as a distinctly Hegelian-Marxian interdisciplinary social
research endeavour, capable of making an impactful critique of social and
political life.
The first challenge has been framed as the ‘domestication’ of Critical
Theory (see Thompson, 2016). Following Honneth’s Critical Theory of
Recognition, social pathologies are today increasingly framed through the
optic of ‘pathologies of recognition’ (Laitinen et al., 2015; see also Zurn,
2011; Harris, 2019), with structural-relational Marxism displaced by a
primarily intersubjective account of the social world. While this approach
is credited with helping to expand the focus of Critical Theory from its
perceived productivist-bias (Laitinen et al., 2015), the recognition-lens is
viewed by its critics as being socio-theoretically, philosophically and polit-
ically problematic (Fraser & Honneth, 2001; McNay, 2007; Thompson,
2016, 2019, inter alia). Specifically, the dominant ‘pathologies of recog-
nition’ approach seeks to apprehend all social problems through an
exclusively intersubjective framework; and thus suffers from what McNay
(2007) deems a ‘scholastic epistemocentricism’.1 In short, this means that
every social problem, including maldistribution, is increasingly researched
through an intersubjective perspective. For example, Schaub and Odigbo
(2019) have recently presented the reliance on foodbanks as a manifes-
tation of ‘consumptive need misrecognition’. For Nancy Fraser, such an
exclusively intersubjective account fails to capture the central dynamics of
neoliberal political economy, which extend far beyond the intersubjective
register, to include:
1 By this rather ungainly term, borrowed from Bourdieu, McNay (2007) means that
recognition theorists risk distorting their conception of the social world in order to
retain the validity of their ‘recognition’ approach. For McNay, instead of admitting the
obvious reality, that a monistic recognition lens is unviable, recognition theorists alter
their understanding of the social world to fit within the parameters of their heurism.
…the supply and demand for different types of labor; the balance of power
between labor and capital; the stringency of social regulations, including
the minimum wage; the availability and cost of productivity enhancing
technologies; the ease with which firms can shift their operations to loca-
tions where wage rates are lower; the cost of credit; the terms of trade; and
international currency exchange rates. (Fraser & Honneth, 2001: 215)
In short, ‘pathologies of recognition’ approaches can be seen as socio-

theoretically limited in their failure to adequately capture the true breadth
of socio-political and economic dynamics at work within the social world.
Furthermore, the ‘pathologies of recognition’ account can be read
as evincing a neglect of central Marxian philosophical insights. For
Thompson, social research which is predicated on a ‘pathologies of recog-
nition’ framing is built upon an inescapably ‘neo-Idealist’ social ontology;
it invests social subjects with cognitive capacities which they cannot
possibly possess. As Thompson persuasively argues, scholars who hold
there to be ‘a self-sufficiency to the powers of intersubjective reason,
discourse, structures of justification and recognition’ fail to account for
the ‘potency of social power, rooted in the material organisation of social
life’ (Thompson, 2016: 15). Recognition scholars hold the intersubjective
capacities of the subject to be infallible, detached from wider socialisation
processes. A foundational tenet of first-generation Critical Theory, as we
have seen, is that social power and knowledge are connected. This insight
is not only crucial to Hegel’s ‘sociologised’ Kantianism, but also to Marx’s
subsequent materialist inversion of Hegelian idealism. This central strand
of Critical Theory can be seen to be ‘domesticated’ in that it has forgotten
its central, radical insight: ‘the critique of society is critique of knowledge,
and vice versa’ (Adorno, 2005: 250). Indeed, for Thompson, our capacity
to engage intersubjectively, to know other subjects and their places in the
wider social world, must be framed as a capacity that is vulnerable to the
workings of constitutive power in a patriarchal, racist and capitalist society.
Such a ‘domestication’ can also be seen in the politics of today’s leading
Frankfurt School Critical Theorists (Thompson, 2016; Kouvelakis, 2019).
This is perhaps best captured by Deutscher and Lafont’s (2017) co-edited
collection, Critical Theory in Critical Times, which, instead of dealing
with the impending cataclysm of capitalist-induced global warming, or
the distortions to consciousness produced by the ascent of algorithmic
rationality, opens with Habermas’ discussion of ‘dual sovereignty’ in the
context of the European Union. Unlike Delanty’s chapter on Brexit in
8 N. HARRIS
this volume, which seeks to locate the referendum relative to broader

social-political pathologies, regressions in social learning processes and
displaced class antagonisms, Habermas’ text sits closer to Lockean liber-
alism than to dialectical Critical Theory. Frankfurt School Critical Theory
thus risks becoming thoroughly domesticated as its leading voices have
increasingly, ‘receded from the confrontation with the primary source of
social domination and disfiguration of human culture: capitalist market
society’ (Thompson, 2016: 2).
Secondly, and relatedly, Critical Theory is increasingly retreating into
competing abstract philosophical systems, a far cry from the rigorous
interdisciplinary social critique of its prime. While Delanty (2020) and
Schecter (2019), among others, have argued Critical Theory must retain
a clear connection to its sociological roots, leading practitioners such as
Habermas, Honneth and Forst, have retreated from direct sociological
analysis. As Thompson puts it, much contemporary Critical Theory serves
to ‘articulate an academicized political philosophy sealed off from the real-
ities that affect and deform critical subjectivity’ (Thompson, 2016: 3).
In essence, a flambéed Enlightenment Liberalism masquerades as Critical
Theory when penetrating critique is needed more than ever. As Kouve-
lakis (2019) witheringly frames it, Honneth has brought Critical Theory
to the precipice of Hegelian scholasticism. As Englestad’s chapter in this
volume underscores, social and political philosophy desperately needs to
embrace social critique; Critical Theory must not move in the direction of
ideal theory. Frankfurt School Social Research can thus be seen to be at
risk from an excessive ‘philosophisation’, blunting its capacity for critique
and decentring the diagnosis of social pathologies.
Lastly, the merit of Frankfurt School Critical Theory is also increasingly
challenged by decolonial and post-colonial theorists (see Allen, 2016).
To date, two principal criticisms have been raised. Firstly, that social
research which draws on Frankfurt School concepts and methodolo-
gies has systematically ignored colonisation, slavery and the non-Western
experience. Secondly, that the methodologies and concepts developed
by Frankfurt School Critical Theory are themselves tainted by colonial-
ising epistemes and must be urgently reconsidered. While a productive
response to the first criticism can be to acknowledge the need to embrace
a more reflexive cosmopolitan imagination (see Delanty, 2009), the
second charge is harder to constructively imbibe. For Amy Allen, a
commitment to decoloniality heralds the ‘end of progress’, that is, the
belief in clear teleologies which are often complicit in coloniality. Reading
Habermas and Honneth (and, for different reasons, Forst) as saturated

with such Eurocentric progress narratives, Allen argues for a return to
the ‘epistemic humility’ of Adorno and Foucault. Yet, as Martin Jay
(2018) argues, such a solution is not entirely satisfactory; for one reason,
decolonising the normative foundations of Critical Theory à la Amy Allen
retains a remarkably Eurocentric epistemic ensemble. Indeed, Allen can be
read as failing to adequately integrate voices from beyond the Eurocentric
canon, while (rightly) making Critical Theorists question their claims to
universality. However, as Jay submits, one must be careful of a neo-nativist
trend within post-colonial scholarship: Critical Theorists must not retreat
from the critique of authoritarian neoliberalisms in post-colonies, many
of which are simultaneously post-colonial and colonising in the present
(Fanon, 1961; Osuri, 2017). In short, the current impasse might be read
as a dangerously self-castigating paralysis, desperately requiring further
critical scholarship.
3 The Structure
and Contribution of This Volume
It is within this context that this volume was conceived of as an oppor-
tunity to showcase the enduring merits of pathology diagnosing social
research, notwithstanding the very real areas of reflexive analysis that
are undeniably warranted. As the contributors demonstrate, now is a
crucial time to advance a normative, post-liberal form of social research,
focusing on the forms of rationality manifest within the social world. This
volume thus seeks to showcase the contemporary relevance of pathology
diagnosing social criticism as much as its analytic potency. The chapters
gathered here demonstrate that the rise of authoritarian neoliberalism
and widespread defacement of critical consciousness can be powerfully
engaged through a pathology diagnosing, dialectical imagination.
The volume is divided into three parts, grouping together applied
research (Part I), philosophical reflections (Part II) and conscious
attempts at forging new relationships between pathology diagnosing
critique and other schools and traditions (Part III). The contributors
also represent a diverse demographic; ranging from established profes-
sors from the Global South, North America and Europe, to early-career
academics from across Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Turkey, France and
the UK. The diverse spread of ideas and positions offers a chance to unite
10 N. HARRIS
established scholarship with potential future research emerging across

Critical Theory.
In the opening substantive chapter, ‘The Pathogenesis of Brexit:
Pathologies of British Political Modernity’, Gerard Delanty interrogates
‘Brexit’ as a manifestation of social and political pathologies. Far from
offering the British precariat a vehicle for progressive transformation,
Delanty argues that Brexit should be simultaneously framed as a conserva-
tive cultural movement and an accelerant for neoliberal colonisation, both
ironic projections of underlying class resentment. Brexit is thus framed as
a manifestation of a pathology of social consciousness, a displacement of
popular dissatisfaction, which has tragically imploded into an ultimately
masochistic imperial nostalgia and xenophobia. Drawing on Adorno
et al.’s Authoritarian Personality (1994 [1950]), Delanty argues that
Brexit should be viewed as symptomatic of more widespread authoritarian
tendencies emerging within Western liberal democracies. Connecting this
with distortions of communication within the public realm, made possible
through digital communication, Delanty charts how popular discourse
was forced ever further to the right as social, cultural and political patholo-
gies were elided. Delanty’s chapter demonstrates the utility of applying
a pathology diagnosing lens to conduct research on the integration of
political and social pathologies and underscores the continuing relevance
of Adornian ideas for applied social research today. Delanty concludes
that ‘Brexit has two faces: one an inward nationalistic one that draws
its strength from imperial nostalgia, anti-immigrant xenophobia, anti-
cosmopolitan resentment and a revival of nativist English nationalism;
the other one is a neoliberal agenda to free the UK from EU regula-
tion in order to become a global free-trading nation with its basis in
the Anglosphere’. Written before the COVID-19 pandemic, Delanty’s
analysis seems only more powerful in light of recent developments.
Chapter 3, James Stockman’s ‘Pathologies of Reason in Computational
Capitalism: A Speculative Diagnosis of Our Computational Worldview’,
tracks the ascent of a distinct ‘network rationality’. Centring left-Hegelian
themes in his analysis, Stockman argues that computational technology
has shaped how we understand and deploy reason itself. Increasingly,
subjects come to comprehend and value the social world solely through
computational frames of reference. As such, social pathology func-
tions as a crucial heuristic to facilitate research into our fractured and
distorted world view. Matching Delanty’s engagement across social and
political pathologies, Stockman explores the entanglements between
the constellation of computational rationality and right-wing political

dynamics. In a world where humanistic reason is framed as inefficient
and outmoded, legalistic and juridical considerations of data protection
and anti-trust legislation are woefully impotent remedies. To contest the
purported objectivity of ‘network rationality’, Stockman uses the framing
of pathology to prosecute an epistemic engagement with the founda-
tions of computational power and their distinctly material socio-political
implications.
Chapter 4, Estevão Bosco and Wagner Costa Ribeiro’s, ‘Pathologies
of Digital Communication: On the Ascendancy of Right Populism’, uses
a Habermasian framework to research how the social web’s systemic
distortion of communication has facilitated the rise of right-populisms.
Focusing on Brazil, but ranging more widely, the co-authors submit
that the pathological colonisation of the lifeworld by systemic logics is
manifest tout court with digital communication. The insurgent ‘attention
economy’ is found to have undercut communication-oriented, intersub-
jective exchange, substituting meaningful dialogue for a system-oriented
‘attention-as-currency’ model, where ‘value’ is connected to constant
content dissemination and consumption. While the authors acknowledge
the ever-increasing integration of digital systems, their focus is particularly
on private messaging services, which are identified as holding a primary
role in the erosion of communicative reason. To facilitate their argument,
the co-authors commence by providing a detailed sketch of a Haber-
masian pathology diagnosing social research framework, which they apply
through a close reading of analyses of the cybernetic world.
Part II, ‘Ontological and Epistemological Considerations in Social
Pathology Scholarship’ addresses central philosophical concerns for
pathology diagnosing social research. This section opens with Chapter 5,
Michael J. Thompson’s, ‘An Ontological Account of Social Pathology’.
Developing ideas expressed in his iconoclastic The Domestication of Crit-
ical Theory (2016), Thompson argues that the diagnosis of social patholo-
gies must focus on the ways that our social relations are structured.
In opposition to the dominant ‘neo-Idealism(s)’ of Honneth and Forst,
Thompson submits that we must not critique our social forms solely on
the basis of their intersubjective norms, but as a social totality; as a ‘syn-
thetic whole of relations, practices, norms, institutions and purposes’. To
enable such a critique, Thompson argues for a critical social ontology,
so that the researcher can grasp the social totality as a distinct object of
analysis. In keeping with Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
12 N. HARRIS
(1844), Thompson submits that researchers must be attentive to the

pathologies which are foundational in the structures of our social relation-
ships. Namely, the ‘way that our social relations are shaped, as well as the
collective goals and purposes towards which our institutions are oriented’.
Thompson presents how such a structural, social-relational analysis, which
focuses on the objective conditions of our social lives, is best achieved
through a critical social ontology. In summary, for Thompson, the extent
to which society is irrationally constructed, at the level of its relations,
practices and goals, can be determined through a considered engage-
ment with its socio-ontological reality. Drawing on Fromm (1963, 2010
[1991]), Rousseau (1984 [1762]), Zimbardo (2007) and Marcuse (1964,
1977), Thompson’s provocative chapter offers a new avenue for critical
social research which will undoubtedly spark productive debate.
Chapter 6, Onni Hirvonen’s, ‘Who Is Ill When a Society Is Ill?’
also explores key ontological questions for pathology diagnosing social
research. However, in contrast to Thompson, Hirvonen is invested in
a primarily intersubjective account of social pathologies, and thus sits
closer to Axel Honneth’s Critical Theory of Recognition (1995, 2014)
than to Thompson or Kouvelakis. Despite this foundational divergence,
both Thompson and Hirvonen agree on the importance of developing
a critical social ontology to further pathology diagnosing social research.
In Hirvonen’s prose, ‘the stronger the ontological commitments … the
easier it is to evaluate social orders on the basis of the concept of social
pathology’. Hirvonen’s chapter follows Laitinen and Särkelä (2019),
using their four-fold typology of distinct conceptions of social pathology
as a springboard from which to outline the divergent social-ontological
commitments corresponding to each framing. Hirvonen’s contribution to
this volume thus showcases potential areas of productive dialogue across
today’s increasingly divided academy.
Chapter 7, Yonathan Listik’s, ‘A Biopolitical Account of Social
Pathology: Viewing Pathology as a Political-Ontological Issue’, provides a
nuanced post-structuralist-inflected critique of the pathology diagnosing
framework. Yet, rather than merely seeking to deconstruct left-Hegelian
themes, Listik works to ensure their immanent coherence, arguing that
without ‘due sensitivity to the complicities and complications that a diag-
nosis of X as “pathological” precipitates, such research might end up
inadvertently safeguarding the capitalist subject from the intrinsically capi-
talist deterioration that threatens it’. Listik powerfully argues that an
implicitly capitalist ‘immunological’ ontology undergirds much pathology
diagnosing social research, in which the health of an isolated subject

threatened by broader social modalities is the antecedent model behind
the heurism’s appeal and longevity. Listik’s provocative chapter engages
with Honneth (2008, 2015, inter alia), Dews (2007), Freyenhagen
(2013) and Fromm (1963 [1955], 2010 [1991]), seeking to demon-
strate that each approach relies, even if unintentionally, on problematic
conceptions of normality and health. Drawing on Esposito (2008, 2010,
2011), Listik challenges the reader to ‘strive for a non-individualised
social relation, one where immunisation is not in place, and therefore the
pathological openness to the external is not mediated by an administrative
relation’. In short, Listik argues that a considered awareness of the onto-
logical assumptions undergirding pathology diagnosing social research is
urgently required.
Part III: ‘Beyond Pathologies of Recognition: New Voices, New Direc-
tions’, unites authors consciously trying to bridge traditions, schools
and disciplines, deliberately seeking to push Critical Theory beyond its
current neo-Idealist impasse. The contributors to this section thus seek to
bring Critical Theory into dialogue with an explicit, self-aware historical
materialism, feminist philosophy and decolonial theory.
In Chapter 8, ‘Rawlsian Liberalism as a Failure of Critique’, Ane
Engelstad draws on Critical Theory and feminist political philosophy to
highlight the limitations of Rawls’ (1971) A Theory of Justice. Making
the case for the importance of social critique, rather than abstract ideal
theory, Engelstad’s chapter demonstrates the importance of transgressing
disciplinary and school-based boundaries. Rawls’ A Theory of Justice has
dominated political philosophy journals and lecture halls for nearly half
a century, yet, methodologically, Rawls embraced none of the central
insights of Critical Theory. As Engelstad draws out, Rawls’ famous ‘orig-
inal position’ and ‘veil of ignorance’ presupposes autonomous subjects
who are capable of rationally articulating an objective understanding of
justice. As the social pathology diagnosing imagination discloses, and
as Engelstad clearly presents, the forms of rationality that the subject
enacts and reproduces reflect dominant social logics and dynamics. Thus,
the self-interested autonomous Kantian subject of Rawlsian liberalism
crumbles when located within the reality of patriarchal, capitalist, racist
and ableist social relations. While retaining fidelity to the possibilities
of analytic philosophy, Engelstad demonstrates the particular failings of
the Rawlsian imagination, drawing on the work of Charles Mills (2005),
Susan Moller Okin (1989) and Axel Honneth (2007).
14 N. HARRIS
Chapter 9, Denis C. Bosseau’s, ‘The Revolt of the Maladjusted:

Defacing the Currency of Social Pathology Diagnosis in Contemporary
Critical Theory’ provides a withering critique of contemporary pathology
diagnosing social research. Integrating hitherto underexplored authors
within mainstream Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Bosseau makes a
clear, powerful argument: that the dominant understanding of social
pathology fostered by contemporary Critical Theory is one where the
subject is insufficiently adjusted to the mores and norms of the social
realm. While for Honneth this is due to the failure of subjects to satisfac-
torily imbibe the (rational) social norms due to extant, yet malleable, (irra-
tional) intersubjective relations, Bosseau presents a diametrically opposed
account of social pathology. Drawing on Martin Luther King (2005),
Fred Moten (Moten & Harney, 2013) and Franz Fanon (1952), Bosseau
argues that ‘maladjustment’ is exactly what Critical Theory should aspire
for: to disrupt the dominant norms and mores of racist, patriarchal neolib-
eralism. Categorically rejecting the approach of normative uplift anchored
(implicitly or explicitly) to normative reconstructive critique, Bosseau,
echoing Thompson (through Fanon), locates social pathologies within
the dominant structures of the social world. Evoking Marx’s letter to
Ruge (1844), Bosseau reminds us that the job of clarifying the strug-
gles of the age is not one of persuading the ‘undercommons’ to see the
disguised equity and rationality of their plight; rather it is to expose the
manifest contradictions of a world in which multiply marginalised subjects
find it ‘impossible to breathe’ (Fanon, 1952: 183).
Chapter 10, Onur Acaroglu’s ‘The Challenge of Post-capitalism: Non-
Capitalist Temporalities and Social Pathology’, introduces a previously
absent consideration in pathology diagnosing social research: temporality.
For Acaroglu, ‘post- and non-capitalist temporalities are inscribed in the
tendency to resist alienation’, an argument he presents in his recently
published Rethinking Marxist Approaches to Transition (2020). Centring
temporality within the diagnosis of social pathologies, Acaroglu’s chapter
identifies a clear lacuna: that research into social pathology is locked into
a singular present, blind to the multiple dissenting rhythms within social
life. For Acaroglu, a historical materialist optic helps disclose the limita-
tions of such a unilinear ‘march of time’ perspective. Acaroglu illustrates
how the ‘time’ of accumulation is ‘distinct from that of social reproduc-
tion’, despite their substantial overlaps. Exploding the temporal monistic
perspective of mainstream pathology diagnosing research, Acaroglu urges
Critical Theorists to attend to the potential immanent departures from
capitalist processes. The presence of rival temporalities is thus identified

as a crucial area for critical social research.
Harris and Stockman’s co-authored, ‘On the Future of Pathology
Diagnosing Critical Theory’ brings this volume to a conclusion.
Reflecting on the preceding chapters, the co-authors comment on the
importance of a continuing social research endeavour that pushes beyond
the liberal horizon, and engages with the dominant forms of social
reason constituted by, and which reinforce, today’s increasingly destruc-
tive authoritarian neoliberalism. Seeking to unite themes from across
the volume, the co-authors argue that such social research is at its best
when it combines an analysis of the structural-relational form of social
existence, its impact upon the possibility for critical consciousness and
broader social-political logics and contingencies.
The contributions gathered in this volume not only speak to a variety
of concerns, but are also written by theorists working within and across
many different schools, traditions and locations; thus inducing construc-
tive tensions with the potential to disclose productive future syntheses
and relationships. In the face of unfathomable odds, Critical Theory still
harbours the potential for a progressive, rigorous, impactful attack on
social irrationality. In light of the manifold challenges facing a dialec-
tical Hegelian-Marxist Critical Theory, both from internal and external
parties, I hope this volume serves to champion the critical-explanatory
potential of a form of critique which transcends both liberal ideal theory
and the increasingly omnipresent neo-positivism(s). Over the next few
decades, the socio-political and economic challenges that progressive
social researchers will confront will likely be epic in scale as climatic catas-
trophe vies with insurgent neo-fascism as the leading horror expedited
by neoliberal irrationality. It is thus crucial that social researchers remain
sensitive to such destructive, terrifying potentialities. As Adorno (2005
[1951]: 235) writes in Minima Moralia,
[S]he who relinquishes awareness of the growth of horror not merely

succumbs to cold-hearted contemplation, but fails to perceive, together
with the specific difference between the newest and that preceding it, the
true identity of the whole, of terror without end.
The precise form that Critical Theory will take, in ten, twenty or fifty
years’ time is extremely uncertain. The hope embedded in this volume is
that it will contribute towards the safeguarding of a form of social research
16 N. HARRIS
that targets the impact of constitutive power on social rationality, led by

researchers aware of their positionality. In other words, interdisciplinary
Critical Theory.
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PART I
Explorations in Contemporary Social

Pathology Diagnosis
CHAPTER 2
The Pathogenesis of Brexit: Pathologies

of British Political Modernity
Gerard Delanty
The concept of pathology is a useful way to make sense of the negative

aspects of a society.1 Social pathologies refer to the social illnesses and
various kinds of social problems that bring about widespread social
malfunctioning, alienation, malaise and atomisation. In many applications
in social science, the focus is on specific vulnerable groups, the effects
of poverty, unemployment, stress and so on. In this chapter, following
the seminal work of Erich Fromm,2 I argue that the notion of pathology
can be usefully applied in a more general sense to society as a whole in
1 I would like to acknowledge helpful comments from Neal Harris and a reviewer on an
earlier version of this chapter. My thanks too to William Outhwaite and Patrick O’Mahony
for comments. This chapter, it should be noted, was written in early 2020, just before
the pandemic, with which Brexit was to become intermeshed.
2 See Fromm (1941, 1963 [1955], 2010 [1991]). See also Burston (1991) and Harris
(2019).
G. Delanty (B)
Sociology and Social & Political Thought, The University of Sussex,
Brighton, UK
e-mail: g.delanty@sussex.ac.uk
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 23

Switzerland AG 2021
N. Harris (ed.), Pathology Diagnosis and Social Research,
Political Philosophy and Public Purpose,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70582-4_2
24 G. DELANTY
order to make sense of societal regression. There are relatively few studies
on the pathogenesis of political modernity. Klaus Eder (1985) wrote a
classic one on Germany. The idea of modernity engendering pathologies
has been central to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, but has
been rarely, if at all, developed in relation to current trends. In making
this claim, I am not suggesting that there is a normal condition from
which the pathological is a departure. Indeed, it can be the case that
pathologies themselves become normalised.
In this context, I am interested in major political pathologies, which are
related to socio-cultural pathologies. The example I am taking is Brexit,
which I argue is an event of considerable historical significance and that
it can be seen as a political pathology that has nurtured a wider socio-
cultural pathology.3 I would like to make a strong claim and place Brexit
in the context of the pathogenic formation of British political modernity.
It is not my claim that Brexit was inscribed within the course of modern
British history, but that certain historical conditions made it possible.
The outcome was contingent in the end on specific circumstances, but
it cannot be taken on its own as an aberrant event. I also argue that
Brexit is not a specifically British phenomenon. While having British-
specific features, it can be related to trends towards authoritarianism in
other democracies, most notably the election of Trump in the USA.
To this end, in order to try to understand it theoretically, I draw on
one of the major works of social and political analysis in critical theory,
namely the monumental Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950 as
part of the Studies in Prejudice programme (Adorno et al., 2019 [1950]).
I also draw on the work of Erich Fromm, who was closely associated with
Horkheimer’s circle in New York in the late 1930s and wrote key works
on social pathology (see Harris, 2019). One of my key arguments is that
Brexit is a pathology of democracy: it is an elite-led project that disguises
itself by populist rhetoric as the will of the people. It is also an example
of a pathology of entrapment. One of the basic questions is this: why did
an advanced democracy allow an event to take place that has inflicted
major economic, social and political damage? The main argument for
Brexit reflects a deep pathology, namely that Brexit must be implemented
simply on the grounds that it was supposedly decided to do so and should
3 For a wider analysis on Brexit see Evans and Menon (2017), Haseler (2017) and
Outhwaite (2017).
2 THE PATHOGENESIS OF BREXIT: PATHOLOGIES … 25
be implemented even if in the most undesirable way possible and regard-

less of the consequences. This is rather like a doctor giving a patient the
wrong drugs because of a prior decision and not reversing the decision
despite the harmful consequences.
1 British Political Modernity

and the Pathogenesis of Brexit
British democracy and the myth of the ‘mother of parliaments’, is often
taken to be one of the models of democracy for many countries. But polit-
ical longevity can also be nothing more than the survival of the ancien
regime or long ossified political structures. As often noted, the constitu-
tional settlement in Britain was much earlier than in most other countries
and, as a result, its design reflected less the modern spirit of democracy
than an accommodation of the interests of the ruling elites. The settle-
ment of 1688 leading to the Bill of Rights shaped the later development
of democracy in that it was an arrangement between the restored crown
and parliament, whereby sovereignty shifted to parliament, but in a way
that preserved the royal prerogative in the institution of the ‘crown in
parliament’ and the prime minister as the representative of the monarch,
who in constitutional theory appoints the prime minister.
The strengthening of parliament—itself divided into two houses, one
the representatives of the landed hereditary aristocracy, and the other the
representatives of ‘the country’, in essence, the merchant class—against
the crown in the second half of the seventeenth century meant that abso-
lutism would be curtailed in a way that was not the case in much of
Europe when it finally moved against absolutism. But this model was not
fit for purpose in later times. It was itself the product of a failed revo-
lution against the crown in the 1640s. The original English Revolution
led by Cromwell established the short-lived English Republic after the
execution of the despotic Stuart King Charles 1 for treason in 1649.
The radical republican tradition was buried with the Restoration of the
Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the subsequent settlement of 1688, the
so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’, was in effect a counter-revolution that
was never overcome, only constantly modified by Acts of Parliament,
the most important being the Great Reform Act of 1832. The memory
of the republican regicide was repressed in the new myth of parliamen-
tary sovereignty bolstered by the Anglican state church and the imported
Hanoverian monarchy to secure the Protestant succession. Republicanism
26 G. DELANTY
was expunged from the country that invented it. Henceforth it was asso-
ciated with foreign and anti-colonial movements. Paradoxically, England
imported its monarchies from abroad: France, Holland, Hannover. The
1534 Act of Supremacy can be seen as England’s break with the conti-
nent, with which it has been so closely imbricated in the middle ages
(Black, 2019). If a break occurred, it was later with the need born of
political necessity to repress the memory of republican regicide. However,
the relation between Britain and Europe is much more complicated (see
also Simms, 2017).
The result of the ‘English Revolution’ and the subsequent constitu-
tional arrangement—and the convenient absence of a written constitu-
tion—was that England entered the modern age with revolution silenced
and disguised by the nascent Whig theory of history and the fiction of
ancient liberties. There was never any questioning of this myth of parlia-
mentary greatness since Britain was never defeated in war or occupied
by a foreign power and therefore never forced to recreate its political
institutions. Instead it did the occupying. The doctrine of parliamentary
sovereignty, it should be noted, does not pertain only to the House of
Commons but to the two houses of parliament and thus preserves the
monarch as the sovereign. It meant in practice that the Ancien Regime
was preserved and only had to accommodate demands from civil society.
This historical background is key to the pathogenesis of Brexit, which
was predicated on the basis of a myth of sovereignty and a parliamen-
tary tradition that was ill-equipped to deal with changed notions of what
sovereignty means. Parliamentary sovereignty, adhered to for centuries,
came face to face with calls for popular sovereignty and what resulted
was a dysfunctional mixture of both, as reflected in the use of the arcane
ritual of the prorogation of parliament and the royal prerogative to deal
with parliamentary opposition to the government’s Brexit plans. British
Eurosceptics rightly or wrongly criticise the political institutions of the
EU, but fail to see the flawed design of their own political institutions.
One consequence of what was a relic of the early modern period is the
absence of a modern written constitution. The British Constitution (in
effect a medley of documents and Acts of Parliament) did not provide
what all modern constitutions provide, namely a written statement of the
rights of the individual and a recognition of the people as the source
of sovereignty. By investing sovereignty with parliament, British political
modernity located the source of sovereignty in the crown, as represented
in parliament. Everything else is a matter of convention. In an era when

the political establishment were members of the same male Oxbridge-
educated elite, convention was broadly functional for the working of
the political system. But in the era of mass democracy and the funda-
mentally changed circumstances of the present when the masses are less
diffident and respectful of the elites, that gentile class model ceases to be
operational.
There is one other legacy of history that needs to be brought into
the discussion: the ambiguity of British history and English history. The
formative period of British history was the history of England, which
absorbed Wales after the Norman conquest of 1066. The Norman legacy
was confined to England and Wales, which were organised around the
Norman system of government. Part of this was extended to Ireland,
but the conquest, which has been described as ‘internal colonisation’,4
was incomplete. Scotland lay outside the realm with only a Union of
Crowns taking place after the death of Elizabeth in 1601 and the subse-
quent succession of the Scottish James VI as James I. By the time of the
union of England and Scotland in 1707 and the later union of what had
become Great Britain with Ireland in 1801, the course of history led to
the dominance of England in the UK. This was in part due to its size—
today containing 85% of the population of the UK—and the strength of
its economy, but principally was due to its political dominance. The result
was that the UK was formed on a fundamental tension between its consti-
tutive parts. In 1922 the most troublesome element was removed. Today
it is a matter of contention whether the union of Scotland and England
is a voluntary union of equal nations or whether the union created an
entity more in keeping with Hobbes’ Leviathan. What we have witnessed
since the Brexit Referendum is the return of the repressed. The failure to
develop federal structures and solve the basic flaw in the make-up of the
UK simply postponed the problem of the lack of balance in the relation
of England to the other regions. Devolution was one solution, but it was
a case of too little too late and nurtured an appetite for more autonomy.
The belief—sustained by propaganda and popular culture—in the Empire
for a time bound the nations and the classes together (Mackenzie, 1984,
1986). This was the main expression of British nationalism and was also
4 See Hechter (1975) for the original theory. See also Bartlett (1993).
28 G. DELANTY
destined to require large doses of nostalgia made possible by the constant

invention of the past.
This situation of what was in effect a disunited kingdom has some long-
term pathogenic consequences. These consequences should be seen less
as causes than preconditions of later developments. The price paid for the
departure of Ireland in 1922 was the partition of the island. The border
erected as a result of the creation of the two states, the Irish Free State
and the Orange State, has weighed like a nightmare on the history of the
islands until the Good Friday Peace Agreement in 1998 (see O’Mahony
& Delanty, 1998 [2001]). What seemed to be an enduring solution to the
troubled history of Ireland and Britain received a shock in 2016 with the
Brexit Referendum and the implementation of a selective interpretation
of the Referendum that necessitated a reinstatement of the border. This
was a shock that has also rekindled Scottish nationalism.
Two other legacies of political modernity can be mentioned. Due to
the predominance of England in the design of the UK, there was the
curious absence of English nationalism. British nationalism as represented
in the pageantry of the state, crown and empire, until recently, was a
different matter and it was to this nationalism that most of the consti-
tutive nations and classes subscribed. The Irish Home Rule movement
of the second half of the nineteenth century under the leadership of the
Irish Parliamentary Party reconciled itself to much of this imperial nation-
alism, since it broadly accepted Ireland’s place in the empire and in the
British-dominated kingdom. That of course changed after 1918 when
republican nationalism usurped the older conservative nationalism. Scot-
tish nationalism, and to a lesser extent Welsh nationalism, has regularly
raised its voice, though not in the name of republicanism. In contrast,
English nationalism had been silent, if not absent. Perhaps it never had
to express itself, given that the state patriotism of Britain in effect repre-
sented England and when most English thought and spoke of ‘Britain’
they meant England.5 For the greater part, Englishness was expressed
in cultural forms rather than taking an overt political form. That has
all changed since 2016 with the rise of a virulent English nationalism.
While 2016 was a watershed, a politicisation of English nationalism in
the preceding ten years or so was on the rise (Kenny, 2016, 2017).
5 See George Orwell’s poetic portrait of the English and Englishness. See in particular
the essay, written in 1941, ‘England Your England’.
Unlike Britishness, Englishness never adjusted to multiculturalism. Non-

white British people did not identify with what had become the rallying
call of the far-right, such as the National Front and the British National
Party. Xenophobia, racism, anti-migration patriotism and an increasingly
demonic Europhobia morphed into each other to produce a new and
powerful culture of authoritarian nationalism that increasingly dominated
the Conservative Party (see Kumar, 2003; Haseler, 2017).
Finally, there is the legacy of empire, which defined Britain for some
two hundred years, specifically from the mid-nineteenth century to the
middle of the twentieth century. What has rendered the post-imperial
context susceptible to pathologies is that the loss of empire occurred at a
time when two other developments unfolded. Britain emerged victorious
from the Second World War and the myth of its victory—which was due
to the USA and the USSR— sustained the sense of imperial grandeur even
as the empire effectively disappeared. This was also the moment when the
UK joined the then EEC, embracing the Europe it helped to defeat. Thus
a national myth of greatness was sustained long after the reality on which
the myth rested had disappeared. Membership of the EEC was broadly
embraced by the political right and for a time met with some resistance
from the left. Europe was not seen as an enemy. This was partly because
European integration in the early 1970s was largely a matter of economic
cooperation and because the British elites believed they could dominate
the project while remaining sufficiently distant. It was only a matter of
time before that optimism would be questioned. There were also limits
to the capacity of the state and popular culture dedicated to nostalgia to
produce it in sufficient quantity and to satisfy new demands that did not
so easily fit into the received view of the British past. The declining signifi-
cance of the two world wars, the reality of a post-imperial nation entering
the post-industrial society and the growing confidence of the post-war
project of European integration all provided the basic ingredients for a
revival of British nationalism. The long-dormant English nationalism was
slowly awakened and its target was Europe.
I have outlined in the foregoing the basic elements of the cauldron that
produced the pathogenesis of political modernity in Britain and which all
came to a head in 2016 with the ill-fated Brexit Referendum, which marks
the point at which Britain made its break with Europe. In doing so, I am
stressing here the British specificity of Brexit, which was influenced by the
course of British history. However, I emphasise that there was nothing
in that history that foreclosed any specific outcome, which was always
30 G. DELANTY
determined by the circumstances of the present. As argued, the histor-

ical legacies served rather as established preconditions that made possible
later movements, such as Brexit. From a sociological perspective, emphasis
must always be placed on how social actors in a given situation interpret
their times and their circumstances. If the circumstance had been different
in 2016, there would no doubt have been a different outcome due to a
different interpretation of the question posed by the Referendum. I shall
return to this later and also to the other dimension of Brexit, namely that
it was a British expression of wider societal trends that can be found in
many other countries.
2 The Making of a Political Pathology:

The Referendum and Its Aftermath
Like most countries today, the UK is a parliamentary democracy. Despite
the arcane historical inheritance in the design of its political institutions,
it is not unlike most other liberal democracies in that in practice elected
governments rule rather than the people directly. Public participation in
government is indirect, with public opinion organised in different ways as
well as other inputs, such as from experts, pollsters and lobbyists. Laws
are made by parliament. For these reasons, most liberal democracies have
a difficult relationship with plebiscitary democracy, whereby the public
make laws, or at least provide parliaments with the necessary decisions to
make laws. Referendums are one of the main instruments of plebiscitary
or direct democracy (Tierney, 2014). Countries that use this instrument
need to do so with caution given the potential for Referendums to under-
mine the basic principles of liberal democracy. Referendums are also
regarded with suspicion by the proponents of radical democracy, since
they stifle and frustrate public participation and effectively service as a
substitute for deliberation. Some examples can be given to illustrate the
dangers of Referendums.
Ireland regularly has Referendums, but these are normally for single-
issue problems (amending a constitutional law, for example, such as
legislating for Gay marriage or abortion). Switzerland makes more exten-
sive use of Referendums where they are part of a political process and
may take a more complicated format whereby a follow-up Referendum
may be required in the manner of a run-off election.6 There has been

a general increase in the use of Referendums across European coun-
tries, but where they are used there is generally an acceptance of the
need to define the rules governing majority-making, such as the speci-
fied requirement of a supermajority, or a required minimum turn out,
etc. (see Hollander, 2019; LeDuc, 2003). The UK has had few and those
were mainly for regionally specific issues. There were only three national
Referendums, with the first two resulting in a no vote majority, so the
status quo was not changed.7 The 2016 Referendum was the first to result
in a vote for change. The result was tumultuous for several reasons. This
was despite one protection built into it: it was an advisory Referendum,
not a legislative one. In other words, the outcome did not have to be
implemented; it was designed to inform government policy. That is why
no other safeguards were built into it, such as a supermajority.
Referendums, unless they are qualified in some way, are otherwise
based on simple majorities. While this can be an instrument of democ-
racy, for example, as a way of testing the public mood, as a method
for public participation, they can easily become anti-democratic. This is
because democracy is not only about decision-making by majorities; it
also secures protections against what majorities can do, especially where
they claim to be in the name of ‘the people’. Democracy is therefore as
such about the protection of minorities from majorities as it is about the
rights of majorities. Two other points need to be made.
Unlike election outcomes, which can be reversed at the next election,
Referendums that are not properly legislated for can lock a society into
a course of action that cannot be easily reversed or subject to negoti-
ation. Here the danger of a deep pathology is very great and happens
when a tiny majority secures a decision that is binding for everyone but
the outcome needs further interpretation due to a lack of clarity on the
practical implications. This happens when a Referendum is called on a
question that has no clear answer.
The Brexit Referendum was momentous in that the outcome was not
expected and was immediately co-opted by previously marginal groups
who in effect brought about a conservative cultural movement that fed
6 On run-off Referendums see Henley et al. (2019).

7 These were in 1975 on European membership, 2011 on an alternative voting system,
and the 2016 Referendum.
32 G. DELANTY
off various kinds of class resentment. 52% voted Remain and 48% voted
Leave, with the majority of the Leave vote in England (Clarke et al.,
2017; Evans & Menon, 2017). It did not need to be called in the first
instance. It was a high-risk calculation of the then Prime Minister, David
Cameron, as a way to end dissent in the Conservative Party. However, it
received parliamentary approval without extensive scrutiny and an act of
parliament passed without any consideration of what might happen were
the Leave Vote to win. The main parties canvassed, without great enthu-
siasm, for Remain, confident that the masses would be obedient and heed
the advice of the elites to vote remain. Although it was a consultative
Referendum, the government and opposition regarded it as legislative,
though there was no constitutional reason to do so. Within months after
the outcome, there was swift silencing of the legal status of the Refer-
endum as consultative. It was repackaged as something that had to be
implemented. Since it was consultative, the Act of Parliament did not
define the vote share required for a determinate majority. The majority of
3.8% (c 1.2 m) was very small but was deemed to be decisive and ‘the will
of the people’ and thus had to be implemented, despite no definition of
what was to be implemented. Leaving the EU has multiple meanings and
many adverse implications. Deadlock in the political system arose after an
election, which left the governing party without a majority and dependent
on support from a far-right Unionist party in Northern Ireland.
Over a three-and-a-half-year period, until the general election of
December 2019, a process of radicalisation took place in both the political
system and in the wider society, especially in England. In this sense, Brexit
was as much a cause of change as a consequence of changes that had
occurred. Brexit became the mantra of the right and underwent ever new
and darker interpretations as to what it might mean. Leaving the EU in
2016 could have meant a so-called ‘soft Brexit’, but due to the variety of
interpretations as to what this might be, and the ascent of new and more
radical interpretations, no consensus was reached. Meanwhile, the tide of
opposition grew; but this was divided on the question of the preferred
method to stop Brexit. There was a fierce debate between factions on
whether a second Referendum was desirable. Those who favoured a
second Referendum could not agree when it should be staged, or agree
on the precise wording of the question posed. The Liberal Democratic
Party’s proposal of a direct, unilateral revocation of Art. 50 triggered
further divisions.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
low, the sharaki lands amounted to 264,000 acres only, as against
nearly 1,000,000 in 1877.
As for the high lands lying immediately between the river and the
basin dyke, only eight or nine times in a century does the Nile rise
high enough to flood them. They are called ‘berms,’ and are
ingeniously irrigated by means of special high-level canals, which,
starting from a point above the head of the basin system, or perhaps
leading down from an upper system, pass by means of a siphon
under the feeder canal. The berms are, of course, also irrigated by
lifting water directly from the Nile itself.
There are forty-five systems of basins in Upper Egypt, most of
which, and those the largest, are on the left bank. Some of the
feeder canals are insignificant, and feed only two or three basins.
Others, like the Sohagia Canal, south of Assiout, feed an extensive
system, and are real rivers when full. The basins themselves are
5,000 to 15,000 acres in extent, and it can easily be understood that
when they are taking in they have an enormous effect in diminishing
the pressure of the flood, and, on the other hand, their discharge
lengthens it out in the lower reaches of the river, when the level has
already fallen very much at Assouan. While the basins are filling in
August and September, they absorb about 2,000 cubic metres per
second. Besides this, a considerable amount is employed in filling
the channel of the Nile itself and its branches. Evaporation,
absorption, and direct irrigation, also play their part, and the result is
that the discharge of the Nile at Cairo is some 2,500 cubic metres
less than it is at Assouan. But during October and November the
basins are discharging. The southernmost ones are empty by
October 15, those in the neighbourhood of Cairo not till about
November 30, or even later. The consequence is that the Nile at
Cairo in October is discharging 900 cubic metres per second more
than at Assouan, and in November 500 more.
In November, therefore, the visitor to Cairo can still get some idea
of what Upper Egypt is like in flood-time. From desert to desert it
stretches, one vast lake, divided by a network of dykes, and studded
here and there with villages raised on artificial mounds, which year
by year rise higher on their own ruins. A greater flood than usual
makes terrible havoc in these villages; for the rising water soon
crumbles their mud walls, and the whole collapses like a pack of
cards. Every mortal thing is living on the dykes, which play the part
of roads; only the water-fowl, emerging in thousands from their
secluded marshes, spread themselves in security over the wide
waters, and here and there an isolated villager may be seen in an
ancient palm-wood tub, paddling and baling by turns. The dykes run
on the same lines as they have run for centuries, and on them the
traveller, on his way to visit the Pyramids of Gizeh or the Tombs of
the Kings at Sakkarah, the burial-ground of ancient Memphis, may
watch the whole life of Egypt pass and repass in long procession, set
as in a frieze. Work in the fields, of course, is at a standstill, but the
villages are humming with preparation for the sowing, and alive with
flocks of goats and sheep, camels, buffaloes, and asses; even the
rats have been forced to the same refuge, and may be seen popping
in and out among the roots of the palm-trees.[4] Where one basin
drains into another the fisherman spreads his net, and reaps a rich
harvest in the rush of the current. At intervals are stationed pickets of
grave watchers, squatting patiently alongside large bundles of millet
or maize stalks. This is all that remains of the corvée service, and
gladly is it borne.
For every villager is interested in the preservation of the dykes,
and apart from ordinary accidents this great lake, owing to the swift
changes of temperature in the neighbouring desert, is liable to
violent storms, which drive great waves against the crumbling dykes,
and would soon break them if left alone. The millet stalks are put
down to break the force of the waves. Each village omdeh, or
headman, is responsible for these arrangements, and he, too, may
be met upon the dykes, a picturesque figure in flowing black and
white, mounted on an ambling Arab pony, going round to see that all
his sentinels are on duty. How near the past is brought, when you
enter the tombs and find painted on the walls, or figured out in stone,
the same people engaged in the same pursuits, as though Egypt had
not been since then for thousands of centuries coveted and seized in
turn by so many invading nations! The cultivator of the soil, moulded
by the unchanging and imperious demands of the great river, to
which he owes his whole subsistence, has retained the customs, and
even the features, of those remote forerunners, who are his
ancestors in everything, except, perhaps, by descent of blood.
Under the Pharaohs and under the Romans the whole of Lower
as well as Upper Egypt was under basin irrigation, and the whole
country was cultivated. In those days Egypt was the granary of the
Mediterranean, and at the time of the Arab conquest, A.D. 700, her
population was estimated to number 12,000,000. Under Arab rule
began that period of deterioration which lasted for 1,100 years, and
which, had the system of irrigation been less natural to the physical
conditions of the country and less simple, would have resulted in an
absolute abandonment of cultivation, and reduced Egypt to the state
in which Mesopotamia, once the garden of the world, finds itself to-
day. Even as it was, by A.D. 1800 the population was brought down to
about 2,000,000, and all the northernmost and greater half of the
Delta had become a neglected and uncultivated swamp. War,
famine, and pestilence, in turn, had played their part; but the
fundamental cause of all was the misgovernment, which had
neglected the irrigation. For in basin irrigation, as, indeed, with all
irrigation, two things are of the utmost importance: the first, to get the
water on to the land; and the second, to drain it off again. Salt is the
great enemy to be fought. Not only do the Nile waters contain a large
quantity of salts, in solution, but the strata underlying the alluvial
deposits, being of marine origin, are also rich in salts. If the water is
allowed to stand on the land, evaporation takes place, until nothing
but a salt efflorescence is left. While if the land be so water-logged
that the level at which water can be obtained by digging is brought
near to the surface, the water containing salts from below is drawn
upwards by means of capillary attraction, and once more
evaporation takes place, leaving the salts in the soil. It is clear that
as the natural level of the land approaches sea-level it becomes
more and more troublesome to provide proper means of carrying off
the water. Accordingly, the northernmost parts of the Delta were the
first to suffer, and gradually the line of cultivation receded.
Nor was this all. No one looking at a map of the Delta can fail to
have been struck by that extraordinary feature of the northern coast-
line, the great lakes. At the present time there are in the Delta about
3,430,000 acres of land cultivated or under reclamation, and another
500,000 acres of waste land. North of these lie 1,180,000 acres,
either permanently covered by the lakes or else flooded by them
from September to December. Between the lakes and the sea is a
belt of sand-dunes or sandy plains, pierced occasionally by
openings. The sand-dunes are constantly being augmented by the
prevailing north-west winds. These lakes or lagoons are for the most
part extremely salt, and are distributed as follows, beginning from the
west: Lake Mareotis, 70,000 acres; Edku, 60,000 acres; Borillos,
180,000 acres, and as much more during flood and early winter; and
Lake Menzalah on the east, largest of all, 490,000 acres, and
flooding 200,000 acres more at the same time of year. All these
waste lands, now known as the Berea, were cultivated in Roman
times, some being occupied by vineyards, others by wheat, and it
would seem that the lakes were kept from extending landwards by
dykes. But when the land was allowed to go out of cultivation no one
had any interest in looking after the regulation of the lakes. First, the
passage through the sand-dunes became silted up, because, as the
basins decreased in number, less water was drained from them into
the lakes at the time of the inundation. Then, after the closing of the
openings, the water gradually rose, breached the neglected dykes,
and completed the ruin of the land. Once the openings in the dunes
are closed, the lake has to rise to a considerable height before it can
force its way through again, owing to the continuous action of the
sand driven by the wind. In this way it came to pass that neither of
the lakes had more than one opening into the sea, and
consequently, rising in flood-time above sea-level, invaded the lands
to the south.
Another cause may have possibly contributed to the same effect
—namely, a sinking of the coast lands. Nowhere is this a more
probable explanation of the facts than in the neighbourhood of Lake
Manzalah. Before the Arab conquest much of what is now a shallow
lake was famous for its gardens, palm-groves, vineyards, and wheat-
fields; besides its agricultural villages, it contained towns famous for
their cloth and cutlery manufactures, like Tunah, Damirah, Dabik,
and, above all, Tinnis. But at the time of the conquest these towns
were already islands in the lake, a position which enabled them to be
the last stronghold of Coptic resistance to the Moslems.
Whatever the cause or the combination of causes—and the
history of these tracts remains very obscure—the results were the
retreat southwards of the cultivated area, with the consequence that,
after over 1,000 years of Mohammedan rule, Egypt found herself in
the weakened and impoverished condition already described; saved
only from annihilation by the system of basin irrigation, of which the
traditions survived, though in a diminished area, stubbornly
preserved from age to age by her industrious and conservative
peasantry.
CHAPTER III
PERENNIAL IRRIGATION
It was the Viceroy Mehemet Ali who revolutionized the methods of

Egyptian agriculture, and introduced what is known as perennial
irrigation—that is to say, irrigation all the year round, as opposed to
irrigation during the flood only. In all the annals of the East there are
few more striking figures and few histories more exciting than that of
the Albanian tobacco-seller, who, rising high in the favour of Sultan
Mahmoud, was sent to Egypt as Viceroy in 1810. Adopting a method
well known in Cairo, and well calculated to secure the respect, and
even the affection, of Orientals, he consolidated his power by the
treacherous murder of the Mamelukes, and thoroughly organized the
military resources of his province. Summoned to the aid of the
Sultan, his armies bloodily stamped out the successful rising of the
Greeks in the Peloponnese, and left to himself he would have settled
the question of Greek independence once for all. But his summary
proposal to transport the whole Christian population, and repeople
the Morea with Mohammedan plantations, provoked the intervention
of the Powers, and at Navarino he suffered the complete loss of his
fleet. Undismayed, he conceived the idea of making himself master
of the Turkish Empire. His armies overran Syria, and easily
overcoming the Turkish opposition, he threatened Constantinople
itself. Once more, if left to himself, he would have succeeded in his
object, but once more the slow processes of European diplomacy at
last resulted in action. British guns gave the death-blow to his hopes
at Acre, and Turkey was saved from her ambitious vassal, though
Egypt remained a practically independent State, and her sovereignty
became the hereditary appanage of the house of Mehemet.
In the region of domestic policy this strange combination of
barbarism and genius proved that he retained the commercial
instincts of the tobacco-seller as well as the far-reaching ideas and
the drastic methods of the despot. He perceived the advantages
which would accrue from the cultivation of cotton and the sugar-
cane, hitherto unknown in Egypt. These crops are impossible under
a system of basin irrigation; for though they require to be watered all
through the summer, they would be ruined by complete inundation,
and the shallow flood canals are well above the summer level of the
river. But difficulties were nothing to Mehemet Ali. The corvée was
called out, and the unfortunate fellaheen were set to work to dig new
canals and reconstruct the existing water-ways in the Delta, so as to
render them capable of conveying water during the period of low
Nile. At the same time the dykes along the banks of the Nile and the
canals were very much strengthened, so as to keep out the flood;
the old basin dykes were obliterated, and arrangements made for
irrigating the land from the new canals.
Of course, perennial irrigation in itself had always existed in
Egypt. It would have been indeed strange if the principle applied by
anybody who daily waters a window-box had not occurred to the
Egyptians. The Nile berms were often enclosed to protect them from
inundation, and watered directly from the river all the year round,
while within the basins themselves considerable tracts were irrigated
from wells. But never before had special canals been provided by
Government for perennial irrigation. The advantages of perennial
irrigation are that crops like cotton and sugar can be grown, which
would otherwise be impossible, and that two, or even three crops,
can be produced in a year, instead of only one. The land is therefore
increased in value, but, on the other hand, there are serious
objections. First of all, the land is deprived of the full benefit derived
from the annual renewal of the soil by the silt deposit. Agriculture
becomes a much more intricate and difficult process; the exhausted
soil has to be constantly refreshed and stimulated by dressings and
manures. The basin irrigator makes less profits, but he has less risk
and less anxiety; he can only ride a donkey, while the perennial
irrigator can ride a horse. But behind the horseman sits black Care.
A low summer supply means to him the waste of many weeks’
labour and much expenditure in preparing and sowing his fields; the
basin irrigator does nothing till the flood is over, and should the
inundation not cover a part of his land, it merely means that that part
lies fallow for another year, and suffers no deterioration. A breach in
the dykes during the flood is inconvenient to the one, no doubt, but
fatal to the other, for it means the ruin of his growing cotton or sugar.
And under perennial irrigation it is much more likely to occur, for the
basins act as a safety-valve in the inundation, and, while they
lengthen out the period of the flood in Lower Egypt, enormously
decrease its volume at any given time; but when the same lands are
receiving only an occasional watering, the volume that rushes to the
sea is by so much the greater, and the pressure on the dykes is
heavily increased.
If Mehemet Ali had been content to preserve the old basin dykes,
the vivifying effects of the flood-water might have been occasionally
applied, and some of these dangers averted. But, as we have seen,
everything had to give way to the immediate cultivation of cotton,
and the dykes were levelled. Nor was this the only error committed.
The new canals were faulty in slope and alignment. Too often their
subsidiaries were constructed merely with the object of carrying
water to the lands of powerful and favoured individuals, without
regard to the general interest. It was found in consequence that an
enormous silting up of the canals took place every year. But the
Viceroy, with all the forced labour of Egypt at his free disposal, took
little heed of this, and vast numbers of men were dragged from their
homes every year to redig the canals. Even so it was impossible for
the task to be completed before the next flood came round. The
lower reaches of the canals remained choked with mud and weeds,
and, worst of all, proper drainage was neglected.
When Napoleon was in Egypt in 1798, his master mind,
accustomed to go to the root of many matters in spite of all the
alarms and distractions of war, perceived how much might be done
by a regulation of the water at the point of the Delta. His idea was to
close each branch of the river alternately during the flood, and so
double its effect. Mehemet Ali proposed to apply the same principle
to low-water, and began to close the head of the Rosetta or left-hand
branch of the Nile with an enormous stone dam, so as to divert the
whole supply into the Damietta branch. Linant Pasha, then chief of
the French engineers, who had been brought over to advise upon
the new works, persuaded him to abandon this design, and
proposed instead to build a barrage upon each branch, constructing
them in the dry, and then diverting the Nile into its new course by
means of earthen dams. The Viceroy approved, and at once
proposed, with characteristic energy, to dismantle the Pyramids and
make use of their material, just as Sultan Hasan had once stripped
the marble casing from the Great Pyramid to construct his famous
mosque. Fortunately, the prosaic question of transport arrested this
design, and new limestone quarries were opened near Cairo instead.
But although workshops were built, material collected, and
foundations dug, Mehemet seems to have lost all interest in the
work, and in 1835 he abandoned it altogether, and for seven years
nothing more was heard of it.
Two things appear to have operated in his mind. It seemed
simpler to keep on digging out the main canals by the help of the
corvée, and cheaper, too, because nothing was wanted but the
unpaid labour, though it was false economy. And, secondly, his ill-
regulated but far-reaching imagination was already busy upon a new
idea, nothing less than the construction of a great reservoir, which
should store up the surplus water of the winter and let it out again in
the summer, thereby, as he supposed, rendering unnecessary the
construction of any minor work like a barrage.
Surely there can be no more curious instance of the irony of fate
than the history of these two great ideas—the Barrage and the
Reservoir. Both in turn have been carried into successful execution
by engineers and statesmen belonging to the very nation which
shattered the ambitions of their first authors. Against the crumbling
walls of Acre, held so stoutly for weeks by the English sea-captain,
when even the notion of a day’s defence seemed a madness,
Napoleon’s dreams of Eastern empire dashed themselves vainly to
pieces. Forty years later the same walls could not withstand for half
a day the guns of their former defenders, and Mehemet Ali in turn
saw his own imperial dreams finally dissolve. Mehemet neglected
the Barrage, because he thought the Reservoir would make it
unnecessary; and yet in the end it was only the successful working
of the Barrage which gave new life to the project of the Reservoir,
and made its completion an absolute necessity.
The Viceroy, perhaps, deserves little credit for his idea. In matters
of irrigation it is often much easier to see what to do than how to do
it; like other great men, he imagined better than he knew.
Undoubtedly he was fascinated by the fame of King Amenemhat of
the Twelfth Dynasty, and his construction of Lake Mœris in the
Fayoum. He constructed a new regulator at the spot where the Bahr
Yusuf enters that extraordinary province, and even built himself a
house there. But whether because of the inherent difficulties of the
subject, or because of foreign complications, nothing was done until
in 1842 his mind reverted to the idea of the Barrage at the point of
the Delta. The Frenchman Mougel had the address to couple his
design with a scheme of military fortifications, and, attracted by this
double advantage, Mehemet at once ordered the works to be begun,
though, unfortunately, his energy was more devoted to making the
point of the Delta the military capital of Egypt than towards the
regulation of the water. By this time, however, Mehemet Ali’s career
was drawing to a close, and in 1848 he died, leaving the work in
which he never more than half believed still unfinished.
It is difficult to conceive anything more humiliating and
exasperating than the position of the French engineers who acted as
advisers to the Egyptian Government. Time has vindicated their
reputation, and proved the excellence of their designs and the
soundness of their work; but in their own day they had to suffer
disappointment, and even disgrace, and to bear the brunt of failure,
due not to themselves, but to the conditions under which they lived.
With no authority to enforce the execution of their plans, hampered
at every turn, sometimes by the incompetence, and always by the
unwillingness, of the Arab engineers through whom they had to
work, supported only occasionally by the uncertain breeze of
viceregal caprice, they struggled bravely on, and deserve the
greatest credit for what they did manage to accomplish. In 1853
Abbas Pasha, the then Viceroy, dismissed Mougel from his service,
to mark his displeasure at the slowness of the building, and
appointed a new man. Little was gained by the change. The
Barrages were nominally finished in 1863, and an attempt was made
to close the gates on the Rosetta branch. But a settlement took
place, and they had to be immediately reopened. Not till 1872 was
the Barrage really used, and then only partially on the Rosetta
branch, and not at all on the Damietta. Still, whereas before 1872
only 250,000 acres of summer crops had been matured in the Delta,
and that at the cost of enormous labour in clearing the canals,
afterwards the total was 600,000 acres, and the cost of maintenance
was very much less. The ordinary summer supply available for the
Delta canals was increased from 64 cubic metres per second to 150.
This success brought home to the mind of the then reigning
Khedive, Ismail, the advantages of perennial irrigation and the
cultivation of cotton, and he determined to extend the system to
Upper Egypt and the Fayoum, where he possessed huge estates,
amassed by fair means and foul through the agency of the notorious
Mufettish, Said. Accordingly, in 1873 the great Ibrahimiyah Canal
was dug. Starting from near Assiout, it runs for 268 kilometres nearly
parallel to the Nile on its left bank, and supplies perennial irrigation to
252,000 acres in the provinces of Assiout, Minia, and Beni-Suêf. It
also carries flood-water to a series of basins lying to the west of it,
nearer the desert. Before 1873 the Bahr Yusuf, which feeds the
Fayoum, took its water direct from the Nile, but its head was now
transferred to the left bank of the Ibrahimiyah Canal at Dêrut, and
327,000 acres in the Fayoum came nominally under perennial
irrigation.
It would perhaps have been more reasonable to perfect the
irrigation system of Lower Egypt, and to complete the Barrages
entirely, before embarking on new projects in Upper Egypt. But the
temptation to improve his own lands by simply calling out the corvée
to dig canals was too strong for Ismail; and, indeed, he was not the
man to devote himself to the carrying out of old projects to the
exclusion of new ones. In him the vigorous and practical originality of
his grandfather Mehemet appeared in the form of a fantastic
imagination running riot in all directions, unrestrained by the prosaic
considerations of time and means. Yet with able Ministers he might
have been one of the greatest of rulers. In spite of all the
degradation which his reckless extravagance brought on Egypt, the
country owes him something; for there was generally something
great in his ideas, and time is carrying many of them into effect. It is
impossible not to feel some admiration for the man who, when asked
what gauge the Soudan railway should be, replied, ‘Make it the same
as that of the railways in South Africa. It will save trouble in the end.’
CHAPTER IV
THE CULTURE OF THE FIELDS
It has already been explained that on the Nile berms or high banks,
which are covered by the flood only once in six or seven years, on
islands in the river, and on selected tracts within the basins in the
neighbourhood of wells, it has been the immemorial custom to lift
water on to the fields. Everywhere the two primitive instruments of
ancient Egypt are in common use to-day—the shadoof and the
sakieh. The shadoof is a long pole balanced on a support. From one
end of it is suspended a bucket, and from the other a heavy
counterpoise, equal in weight to the bucket when full of water. The
bucket is made of various materials, very often leather, though the
ordinary kerosene-oil tin of commerce is making its presence felt
here as elsewhere. The shadoof is worked by hand. The bucket is
pulled down into the water, then lifted up by the help of the
counterpoise, and its contents are tipped over into the channel
leading to the cultivated land, where the water is steered by means
of miniature canals and dams into the required direction. I suppose
there could not be a simpler form of unskilled labour than working
the shadoof. Whenever I think of the fellah of Upper Egypt, I think of
the shadoof. Up and down, creak and splash, hour after hour, day
after day, he goes on lifting and tilting, with an amazing and
monotonous regularity. Nothing disturbs him—not even a steamer
grounded on a sand-bank twenty yards in front of him. As he stands,
naked except for a loin-cloth of blue cotton, with his absolutely dull,
impassive features, his magnificent chest and arms but weak legs,
you cannot help wondering which came first, the shadoof or the
shadoof-man, so perfectly are they adapted to each other. Two
piastres are the humble guerdon of the long day’s labour. You can
calculate upon the fellah as you could on a machine. But, in spite of
it all, deep down in his soul lies the sentiment which redeems him
and distinguishes him from a mere machine—his absorbing love for
the soil. Take him away, set him to other tasks—to serve, for
instance, in the army—he will perform his duties with the same
unfaltering regularity and docility; but all the time he is thinking in his
heart of the black soil and the water of Egypt. In Omdurman I asked
a more than usually intelligent Egyptian soldier, who had been told
off to perform some small services for me, ‘Do you like being in the
army?’ Without hesitation came the answer, ‘No.’ ‘What do you want
to do?’ ‘I wish to be at home,’ he said, ‘and cultivate the ground.’
With a single shadoof water can be lifted 2½ metres; but when the
bank is high a second or third tier of shadoofs is employed, and in
some places as many as five shadoofs may be seen lifting the water
from one level to another, till it reaches the fields. One man working
twelve hours a day can lift enough water to irrigate an acre of cotton
or corn in ten days.
The sakieh, or Persian water-wheel, consists of a vertical wheel
with a string of buckets attached to it, which, as the wheel turns
round, are let down into the water, come up full, and discharge their
contents into a channel as they come to the top. The wheel is turned
by means of spokes, which catch in a horizontal wheel worked by
oxen, buffaloes, or some other beast of burden. If the lift is high, the
string of buckets may be very long; but if the wheel itself dips into the
water, there may be no string at all, and it is then called a taboot.
The buckets are often earthenware pitchers, and the wheels
themselves are generally of the rudest construction, and made of
palm wood; but new and improved iron water-wheels are coming into
use. Still, whether of iron or of wood, they all seem to make the
same peculiar sing-song whine. There is no sound more
characteristic of Egypt. It has a peculiar penetration. Night and day it
continues. I believe Egyptian music is founded upon it. The fellaheen
say the cattle will not work unless they hear it. Certainly when one
stops, the other stops also.
In the Fayoum, where, owing to the difference in the levels, the
canals have often a very high velocity, there are very ingenious
water-wheels or turbines, which play the part of sakiehs, but are
turned by the force of the current; the water thus lifts itself
continuously.
Where the lift is very little, shadoofs and sakiehs are replaced by
instruments called Natalis and Archimedean screws; but, naturally,
since the introduction of perennial irrigation has so increased the
area to be watered by lift, machinery has had to be called in, and
most of the work is done by pumps worked by steam. Each large
land-owner has his own pump and engine, which can be moved from
place to place, and are also hired out to the smaller men. On very
large estates stationary engines have been erected, which, of
course, are able to raise a much larger amount of water; but as a
rule the machinery employed is a portable eight-horse-power engine
and an eight-inch centrifugal pump.
How different is all this from the lot of the agriculturist in other
lands! For him there is no digging or maintenance of canals; no
apparatus of regulators, dams, sluice-gates, siphons, and drains; no
painful lifting of the water by pumps and engines, shadoofs, and
sakiehs. The rain falls upon his fields from heaven without any effort
of his. He looks to Providence to regulate his supply; the Egyptian
looks to a Government department. But the Egyptian, as a
compensation for his extra labour, has the advantage of greater
certainty. He knows the sun will shine. The rise and fall of the Nile,
variable as it is, can be foretold with greater exactness than that of
any other river—with far greater exactness than the duration of the
rainy season in any country in the world. Nature indeed made his
task simple in the extreme, if he had been content with one crop a
year. Every year the flood thoroughly washed the land, and kept it
free from injurious salts; it also covered them with a deposit of mud,
which relieved him from the necessity of dressing and manuring the
exhausted soil. The Nile silt, though singularly rich in potash, the
principal food of leguminous plants, like peas, beans, and clover, is,
however, very poor in the nitrates on which cereals depend. But the
Egyptian clover, called bersine, has the property of secreting nitrates
from the air, and depositing them in the soil to an extraordinary
extent, so that the land was able to bear crops of clover and cereals
in rotation to an unlimited extent without any manuring. The desire to
grow rich by crops like cotton and sugar, and by forcing the land to
double its output, has changed all this. Not only has the summer
supply of water become of the utmost importance, but the soil has to
be constantly refreshed with manures. The question of manures is,
indeed, only second, under perennial irrigation, to the question of
water.
Wherever cattle and stock are numerous, farmyard manure is
used, as well as the guano from the immense colonies of pigeons,
kept for the purpose in specially built pigeon-lofts throughout Egypt.
Between Halfa and Kena there are inexhaustive supplies of nitrates
in the desert, and north of Kena the mounds which mark the sites of
ancient cities, like Abydos, Ashmunên, Medinet, and the rest, serve
the same purpose. The ruins of the past are thus valued by the
agriculturist not less than by the archæologist, perhaps even more
so; for lands in proximity to them are rented higher in consequence.
Year by year more attention is now paid to the dressing of the soil,
as perennial irrigation is more understood and more studied; besides
the natural resources of the country, an increasing amount of
manures is imported from abroad, and there is little doubt that the
growing tendency in this direction will continue.
But all preparation of the soil is worse than useless labour unless
the necessary amount of water can be provided. This amount varies
both with the nature of the crop, the season of the year, and the
position of the land. The critical time is, of course, the summer, when
the supply of water is least and the heat is greatest, and, of course,
in Upper Egypt, where the sun is strongest, and the loss by
evaporation consequently greater, the demand is more urgent than
in the Delta.
The total amount of cultivable land in Egypt is 6,250,000 acres.
Before the completion of the new works, to which period all the
figures in this chapter refer, the total nominally under cultivation was
about 5,750,000 acres. Of this, Upper Egypt claimed 2,320,000—
viz., 587,000 nominally under perennial irrigation, and 1,732,000,
including 1,435,000 under basin irrigation every year, and 297,000 of
Nile berms, which are only flooded once in six or seven years, and at
other times irrigated directly from the Nile by means of shadoofs and
water-wheels. Of the whole of this area only about 20 to 30 per cent.
produce double crops in the year; for the amount of perennial
irrigation is but small, and, although the whole of the Fayoum—
329,000 acres—was supposed to be perennially irrigated, so faulty
was the water-supply that the summer crops were only about 30 per
cent. of the whole, instead of 50 per cent., which is the rule in the
Delta. It seems, indeed, as though matters had been arranged
expressly for the benefit of the tourist; it is Upper Egypt in the winter
season that he goes to see, and it is then that the fields are green
with corn, clover, and other crops. The following table shows the
different crops, and the acreage devoted to them at the different
seasons in Upper Egypt:
Season. Acreage. Crops.
Summer 372,500 Sugar, cotton, vegetables, melons,
summer sorghum (or millet).
Flood 530,000 Flood sorghum, rice.
Winter 2,120,000 Wheat, beans, clover, barley, lentils, flax
(little), onions, vetches.
In Lower Egypt, or the Delta, the total area of fully or partly

cultivated land is 3,430,000 acres, and there are still 500,000 acres
of totally unreclaimed land. All this is under perennial irrigation; half
of it is under summer crops every year, and 40 per cent. produces
two crops a year. The following is a similar table to that given for
Upper Egypt:
Lower Egypt.
Season. Acreage. Crops.
Summer 1,674,000 Cotton, sugar, vegetables, rice.
Flood 980,000 Maize (nearly all), rice.
Winter 2,139,000 Wheat, barley, clover, beans,
vegetables, flax.
Even if we look only to the summer acreage under crops, it is

obvious that the water-supply in the summer is very important; but
when we look to the value of the crop it becomes much more
striking. Far the most valuable crop in Egypt is the cotton, which is
the principal item in the summer. In Upper Egypt the value of a
summer crop is, on the average, more than twice that of a winter
crop per acre, and in the Delta the proportion is nearly the same.
And though the value of the flood crops is increased by the date-
palms, of which there are 5,700,000 paying taxes in Egypt, and
whose produce is gathered at this season, it cannot be compared
with the summer crops. Sugar-cane is now but little grown in the
Delta, and even in Upper Egypt its acreage is rather less than that of
cotton.
Valuable as are the cotton-plant and the sugar-cane, it must never
be forgotten that one of the humbler winter crops, though valued
much lower in point of money, is yet the foundation of well-being in
the others—I mean the Egyptian clover, or bersine, the friend of
beast and man alike. Long before I knew its remarkable properties, I
admired it for its beauty. Green and glossy, it covers acre upon acre
with a luxuriant carpet, in pleasing contrast both to the black soil and
the desert sand, and most refreshing and comforting to the eye. A
bundle of it will satisfy even the grumbling camel; even the
melancholy buffalo looks a shade less depressed when her turn
comes to be tethered in it for her meal. Sheep and donkeys can
hardly eat it down fast enough within the circle of their ropes before it
has grown up again. And all the time it is steadily collecting in the
soil the invaluable globules of nitrate, which will put new life into the
succeeding cotton or corn. The part it plays in preparing the soil can
be estimated by the rotations of crops followed by the Egyptian
cultivator. These are as follows:
On Rich Soils.
Winter. Summer or Flood.
First year Clover Cotton.
Second year Beans or wheat Indian corn.
On Poor Soils.
Winter. Summer or Flood.
First year Clover Cotton.
Second year Clover Cotton.
Third year Barley Rice or fallow.
Rice and barley have their place, because they are less affected
by the injurious salts, which are the great enemies of the soil’s
fertility.
In Lower Egypt cotton is sown from the end of February to the
beginning of April. The land is well watered before it is ploughed for
the seed, and again when the seed is sown. From then until the
beginning of the flood it is watered on the average about once in
twenty days. The harvest lasts from August 20 to November 10, and
the cotton is picked two or three times over. During this time the crop
is watered about once in every fifteen days, but as the water is now
abundant there is nothing to fear. Indian corn is sown from July 5 to
August 30, and October 15 to November 30 is the period of harvest.
It is irrigated at the time of sowing, twenty days after, and then once
in ten or twelve days. The first two of these waterings are, of course,
the important ones. The earlier it is sown, the better the crop will be,
because it will have better weather for maturing; but if the flood is
late, and consequently the water-supply is low, the Government may
have to resort to a system of rotations in sending water down the
canals, and then the Indian corn crop may be sacrificed to the
interests of the cotton. Rice is the wettest of all the crops; the kind
(called ‘sultâni’) sown in May and reaped in November is watered
once in ten days before the flood, but during the flood is given as
much water as the drains can carry off. The other kind (called
‘sabaini’) is sown in August, and also reaped in November. Both in
Lower and Upper Egypt it is purely a flood crop, and takes all the
water it can get. The winter crops, wheat, beans, barley, and clover,
are sown in November and December. Wheat and beans are
irrigated twice, barley once, but clover goes on growing up till June,
and takes more water according to the number of crops, sometimes
three or four, that are taken off it.
In Upper Egypt cotton-sowing begins at the same time, but the
harvest is earlier. Sugar-cane is sown in March, and the canes are
cut from December 15 to March 15. Sometimes the same roots are
left in the ground, and produce another crop in the second year; but
this is never of such quality as the first, and the land has probably to
be left fallow after it. Sugar, therefore, though nominally more
valuable than cotton per acre, is more costly in the long-run. It is
watered every twelve or fifteen days. The other crops are the
summer and flood sorghum, grown on the berms or in tracts within
the basins, and irrigated by shadoofs and water-wheels about once
every ten days; and the wheat, beans, clover, and barley, in the
basins. The cereals are usually not watered at all, but the clover
follows the same course as in Lower Egypt.
Summing up these results, we find that the principal crops in
Lower Egypt are cotton and rice. The cotton needs irrigation about
once in twenty days, the rice once in ten days. To provide this
amount of water, a canal should discharge (after allowance has been
made for wastage) 22 cubic metres in twenty-four hours per acre of
cotton, and 40 cubic metres per acre of rice. That is to say, 1 cubic
metre per second will suffice for 4,000 acres of cotton and 2,150
acres of rice. In Upper Egypt rice is only a flood crop, and cotton and
sugar need about 25 to 30 per cent. more water than in the Delta,
owing to the greater loss from evaporation—that is to say, 1 cubic
metre per second will only suffice for 3,000 acres of cotton or sugar.
During the winter the land throughout Egypt requires on the average
a watering once in forty days. But, as we have seen, it is the summer
supply for the cotton that is the really important thing. We shall see
later what the effect of the reservoir is likely to be in safeguarding
and extending these interests.

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Pathology Diagnosis and Social

Research: New Applications and

More information about this series at

ISSN 2524-714X ISSN 2524-7158 (electronic)

Cover credit: © Jose A. Bernat Bacete, gettyimages

and social-ontological mechanisms—such as the way modern societies

Gramercy Park, NYC Michael J. Thompson

In the summer of 2019, Heinz Sünker organised a conference at the

relevant, Critical Theory must always aspire to be more than another

methodology, seeking to anchor a broad, contemporary Critical Theory

Oxford, UK Neal Harris

1 Introduction: Social Pathology and Social Research 1

Part I Explorations in Contemporary Social Pathology

Part II Ontological and Epistemological Considerations

6 Who Is Ill When a Society Is Ill? 141

Part III Beyond Pathologies of Recognition: New Voices,

Onur Acaroglu is an instructor at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey

field of critical theory. He is co-editor on a proposed collection of cross-

Onni Hirvonen is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Department of

Introduction: Social Pathology and Social

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought dramatic changes to our social,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

declaring: ‘Capitalism Is The Virus’. At the same time as this resur-

1 Social Pathology and Critical Theory

from the explicitly anti-capitalist agenda of his predecessors. Michael J.

2 Pathology Diagnosing Social

In short, ‘pathologies of recognition’ approaches can be seen as socio-

this volume, which seeks to locate the referendum relative to broader

Habermas and Honneth (and, for different reasons, Forst) as saturated

established scholarship with potential future research emerging across

the constellation of computational rationality and right-wing political

(1844), Thompson submits that researchers must be attentive to the

diagnosing social research, in which the health of an isolated subject

Chapter 9, Denis C. Bosseau’s, ‘The Revolt of the Maladjusted:

capitalist processes. The presence of rival temporalities is thus identified

[S]he who relinquishes awareness of the growth of horror not merely

that targets the impact of constitutive power on social rationality, led by

Jay M. (1996 [1973]). The dialectical imagination: A history of the Frankfurt

Explorations in Contemporary Social

The Pathogenesis of Brexit: Pathologies

The concept of pathology is a useful way to make sense of the negative

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 23

be implemented even if in the most undesirable way possible and regard-

1 British Political Modernity

in parliament. Everything else is a matter of convention. In an era when

destined to require large doses of nostalgia made possible by the constant

Unlike Britishness, Englishness never adjusted to multiculturalism. Non-

determined by the circumstances of the present. As argued, the histor-

2 The Making of a Political Pathology:

may be required in the manner of a run-off election.6 There has been

6 On run-off Referendums see Henley et al. (2019).

It was the Viceroy Mehemet Ali who revolutionized the methods of

In Lower Egypt, or the Delta, the total area of fully or partly

Even if we look only to the summer acreage under crops, it is

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