Nancy Fraser

Nancy Fraser is an American philosopher and critical theorist who held the Henry A. and Louise Loeb professorship of politics and philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, where she is now professor emerita. Her work joins political philosophy and feminist theory, and her early books include Unruly Practices (1989) and Justice Interruptus (1997). She has given the Tanner Lectures at Stanford and the Storrs Lectures at Yale Law School, and held the Blaise Pascal chair at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.

Her best-known argument concerns what justice requires. In "From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a 'Post-Socialist' Age," published in New Left Review in 1995, she observed that the "struggle for recognition" was "fast becoming the paradigmatic form of political conflict in the late twentieth century," as group identity displaced class interest as the main medium of mobilization. Rather than pick a side, she called for "a critical theory of recognition" and held that justice today requires "both redistribution and recognition." She later framed the standard as participatory parity, the ability of every person to take part as an equal in public life. Redistribution secures its material condition and recognition its social one, so neither alone is enough. In Redistribution or Recognition? (2003), an exchange with the German philosopher Axel Honneth, she argued that much global injustice stems from systemic features of capitalism, such as firms relocating factories and laying off workers, and cannot be reduced to failures of respect.

She has applied the same frame to feminism and to American politics. Fortunes of Feminism (2013) traces the movement's path from state-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis, and Feminism for the 99%, written with Cinzia Arruzza and Tithi Bhattacharya, is a manifesto. In a 2017 essay in Dissent, "The End of Progressive Neoliberalism," she defined "progressive neoliberalism" as "an alliance of mainstream currents of new social movements" with "high-end 'symbolic' and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood)."

Cannibal Capitalism (2022), shortlisted for the Deutscher Memorial Prize, argues that capitalism cannot be understood as an economy alone. On her account it depends on and consumes conditions outside the market: the natural environment, unpaid care and social reproduction, public power, and racialized populations subject to expropriation outside the wage system. Its political conclusion, in its publisher's words, is the need for "a wide-ranging socialist movement" able to confront that pattern.