Today, nancy fraser may fairly be called the leading socialist feminist of the Anglophone world. Emerging from a background in social philosophy and critical theory, she has produced a body of thought as striking for its radical, totalizing ambitions as for its conceptual clarity and lucid exposition, and impressive not least for its consistent development, in continuous engagement with historical reality. The critiques of French post-structuralism, American pragmatism and latter-day Frankfurt School theory in Unruly Practices (1989), where Fraser first developed her concept of a gendered politics of need; the landmark exchanges with Judith Butler, Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell over the ‘linguistic turn’ in Feminist Contentions (1995); the sophisticated critique of a politics limited to affirmative-action and cultural-difference agendas in Justice Interruptus (1997); the debate—which Fraser very much gets the better of—with Axel Honneth in Redistribution or Recognition? (2003); the expansion of notions of representation, redistribution and recognition to the transnational level in Scales of Justice (2008), calling for a voice for the global poor in the aftermath of the us invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; the watershed critique of neoliberal ‘progressivism’ in Fortunes of Feminism (2013); the path-breaking analysis of the combined economic, political and ecological crisis that has unfolded over the past decade, in The Old Is Dying (2019) and Fraser’s latest book, Cannibal Capitalism (2022)—the range, depth and vitality of this work speaks for itself.

In the course of this, Fraser has managed to combine a high-level international teaching career—as Loeb professor of politics and philosophy at the New School, with visiting professorships inter alia in Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Berlin, Vienna, Cambridge—with unfailing radical commitment. Again and again, she has been to the left of prevailing intellectual wisdom: insisting on economic as well as cultural critique at the height of the post-structuralism boom; breaking decisively with Clintonite feminism; arguing against the inequities of financialized capitalism—the younger generations reeling from ‘crushing debt, precarious work, besieged livelihoods, dwindling services, crumbling infrastructures, hardened borders, racialized violence, deadly pandemics, extreme weather and overarching political dysfunctions’, as she puts it.footnote¹

At the same time, Fraser’s literary and intellectual approach is an unusual one for the left. Trained in analytic philosophy, her method involves positing sets of conceptual distinctions, whose logics she then unfolds. Often these categories are shorthand terms for complex strategic perspectives or political-philosophical ideas: ‘justice’, with its Rawlsian ring; ‘recognition’ and ‘redistribution’; the domains of ‘the cultural’ and ‘the economic’. They are related to each other through elegant geometries, generating further abstractions—ideal-types, paradigms, modes, remedies, claims. As Fraser has argued: ‘Only by abstracting from the complexities of the real world can we devise a conceptual schema that can illuminate it’—‘for heuristic purposes, analytical distinctions are indispensable.’footnote² On the left, however, there is often an instinctive sense—not ungrounded—that analytic philosophy is an alien form. Critics have argued that Fraser’s categories are too abstract; that she does not engage sufficiently with the historical and empirical complexities of her subject matter.footnote³ This essay, though, is interested instead in what her heuristics have to tell us about capitalism itself and the interrelation of its economic, social, geopolitical and environmental crises. First it is necessary to trace the development of her approach.

Fraser was born in Baltimore in 1947. Her father, a second-generation immigrant of Lithuanian Jewish descent, was an importer of kidskin gloves; her mother was from a mixed family, part Russian-Jewish, part Irish Catholic, long-settled on Maryland’s poor agricultural shore; both were ‘fdr liberals’. A precocious student, Fraser was frustrated with the limits of a ‘middling’ public-school education and won a place to study classics at Bryn Mawr, where she discovered a passion and aptitude for philosophy. Caught up in the ferment of the civil-rights movement, then the protests against the war in Vietnam, she joined the sds Labor Committee and was a full-time militant for five years following graduation. Going back to school in 1974, after the movement had wound down, to begin doctoral work on continental philosophy at cuny, this activist experience distinguished her from her younger peers among critical-theory students, who had come of age amid the political confusions of the Ford–Carter years and were keen to do away with what, for them, were the exclusionary grand narratives of class dialectics. Fraser, too, was enthused by the energies of the new movements and the post-structural revolution, but always adopted a ‘both/and’ approach: discourse theory and Marx, Habermas and feminism.

The argumentative structure of her doctoral thesis set the template.footnote⁴ Taking a group of texts—Tocqueville’s Recollections, Victor Hugo’s Napoleon the Little, Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire—Fraser set out to determine a means of adjudicating between ‘competing descriptions of social reality’, in this case, that of the revolutionary year of 1848. Faced with a choice between the critical, the empirical and the narrative, she concluded that the three dimensions were not independent: rather, ‘each presupposes the others and none is foundational with respect to the others.’ Visible already in this early work were two defining traits of Fraser’s philosophical approach: a tendency to transcend dualisms by the addition of a third category that mediates between the assumed opposition, while corresponding to, or overlapping with, elements of each group; and a rejection of any hierarchy of causation in favour of a pluralistic descriptive method, shifting in response to the social reality it encounters. Typically, she would distinguish analytically clear categorizations and then apply a dialectical logic to describe the complex imbrication of social kinds, with a view to uncovering an emancipatory dynamic.

Descriptive sensitivity formed the heart of Fraser’s critique of Jürgen Habermas in a germinal 1985 essay, ‘What’s Critical About Critical Theory?’.footnote⁵ Her starting point was the young Marx’s definition of critical theory as the ‘self-clarification of the struggles of the age’: if those struggles included women’s fight for liberation, then a critical theory worthy of the name should shed light on the structures of oppressive gender relations and the prospects of the feminist movement. Examined in that light, Habermas’s construction fell short. Fraser was entirely at home amid the sometimes bafflingly technical terminology of the three-volume Theory of Communicative Action, handling its models with confidence. As a young feminist philosopher, she found much that was helpful in Habermas’s critique of the advanced-capitalist welfare-state societies of the ‘long upturn’. But where Habermas drew a sharp, though layered, distinction between an exploitative system and an innocent lifeworld, Fraser used the gendering of domestic labour, waged work and political participation to demonstrate the complex inter-relations of domination and family life. Habermas’s androcentric view of the nuclear family and failure to theorize the gendered dimension of social power risked eclipsing the positive and useful aspects of his thought, Fraser argued: his interpretive view of human needs, his distinction between ‘normatively secured’ and ‘communicatively achieved’ action contexts, his four-term model of public/private relations.footnote⁶

Beyond her political commitment to women’s liberation, Fraser’s designation as a feminist philosopher is attributable not so much to a strong engagement with the corpus of feminist writing, contemporary or historic, but to the centrality of domestic labour, welfare and the economic role of the family in her social theory, which places the ‘woman question’ at the heart of her discussions of economic redistribution and identity recognition. The worsening position of women, especially black women, affected by the welfare cuts of the Clinton era, at a time of soaring asset wealth, drove the production of ‘Genealogy of Dependency’, a paper co-written with Linda Gordon, and the programmatic ‘After the Family Wage’, a thought experiment about emancipatory models of social reproduction that would help to deconstruct gender. Fraser’s canonical text, ‘From Redistribution to Recognition?’, grew out of this 1990s experience. Demands for the recognition of gender, ethnic, racial and sexual differences were being forwarded in a world of worsening material inequality, environmental toxicity, falling life-expectancy rates. Justice required both recognition and redistribution, Fraser argued, as well as theorization of the relations between them. Focusing on ‘race’ (already scare-quoted in 1995) and gender, she contrasted ‘transformative’ programmes—the deep restructuring of relations of production and the deconstruction of underlying cultural-valuation dichotomies of ‘race’ and gender—to ‘affirmative’ ones: mainstream multiculturalism, affirmative action and welfare-state amelioration of inequalities within the existing economic and cultural system.